brachistochrone writing

Coldstream

‘I had a dream, which was not all a dream.’ - Byron

The Engineer

The rain was different in London. It splashed and spat from walls and rooftops. It swept in stinging rooster tails from the wheels of surging carriages. It fell like the waters of a force from the broken eaves. The soot and filth of the city seethed in grimy streams: slicking the pavements, scouring the gutters, pooling in street-spanning lakes, choking the narrow drains and drawing forth foul effluent from those shameful, forgotten rivers lying long buried beneath the cobbles.

He walked through the rain and did not step over the streams that crossed his path. He did not hurry from doorway to doorway seeking shelter. He was a thinking man and had reasoned long since that he could get no wetter. The rain coursed down his lank hair and into his sleep-starved eyes. A grimy Neptune’s beard fell from his unshaven chin as he set his face against the downpour.

The city was drowning him. The smell of it rose from the deluged streets and into the steamy air. It was a smell of horses and smoke, of sewage and sodden wool, of the thin gunpowder wistfulness of wet stone and the fat flatulence of rotting vegetables. The noise of it surged around him like an angry sea — costermongers’ cries and thundering carriages and the vicious rasp of the rain on the cobbles.

But the maddening sight of it made no impression upon him. Instead, he looked through the tumbling city as if staring at something which lay at a great distance and from which he could not turn his eyes.

He made his way in some fashion that he could not name, navigating the unfamiliar streets until at last he found himself at the foot of broad stone steps that led to a green door. The door was as wide as he was tall. He raised his head to better gauge the splendour of the great house to which it was the entrance and supposed that it must have been the chill of the water that ran from his hat and down his back at that moment that caused him to shiver.

‘Get yourself along there! Your sort aren’t welcome here.’ A periwigged footman in braided livery stood in the open doorway.

The man in the red coat stared at something that lay somewhere far beyond the footman.

‘Didn’t you hear me? No beggars here!’

The man in the red coat was silent for a long time, and then he said ‘I am Alex Coldstream. I am expected.’

The footman’s face twitched and he made half a bow as he stood to one side in the doorway. Alex climbed the wide stone stairs and took the water-logged hat from his head as he passed under the shelter of a grand portico.

‘Beg pardon sir. It’s the coat see. We get so many of ‘em.’

Alex looked at the footman.

‘If you take my meaning sir,’ said the footman with a nod and a chummy smile.

‘You mean you thought that I had offered my life in service to my country? You are wrong. I have not had that honour.’

There was a pause. The footman looked at Alex. Alex looked at the footman. He became aware that he was the cause of quite a large puddle that had formed on the top step.

‘Shall I take your coat sir?’

Alex lurched backwards from the proferred hand causing the footman to start, and then with more composure he said, ‘I will keep my coat.’

‘As you will, sir. Do come in. There is a fire in the drawing room. I shall fetch the admiral and the maid shall fetch towels. Perhaps your hat sir?’ enquired the footman carefully.

Alex stared as if the man were speaking in a foreign language. Then he took the tattered tricorn from his head, slick with rain and the filth of the road and handed it to the powdered footman.

‘Thank you.’

The footman made a stilted bow and carried the hat away at arm’s length.

Alex found himself alone in a huge hallway with a floor made of marble tiles in a black and white pattern like a chess board. He made a knight’s move, two squares forward and one to the right. He looked at the door of the drawing room that the footman had indicated and considered the squares that lay between him and the doorway. He turned to his left and made another knight’s move - two squares forward and one to the left - then another which brought him up against a huge cabinet and then another that brought him to the door of the drawing room and would have taken him through it if the pattern had continued within, but it did not. He was pleased with himself.

Alex dripped. He walked across the polished wooden boards of the drawing room leaving a trail of small puddles. He was a stranger to rooms such as this. It was furnished with well-stuffed sophas and chaise-longues arranged about a grand marble fireplace that held a grate on which glowed a tidy and well-established fire of coals. The walls were filled with vast dark paintings and mirrors in baroque frames and the air was thick with the sweet smell of beeswax.

Something drew him in across an elaborate rug of extravagant dimension on which he left dark footprints.

A sound.

A skipping tick that seemed to Alex as familiar as his own heartbeat. On the mantle shelf stood a clock. It was ornate and club footed and looked very heavy. It was gilt and ivory and ormolu. Alex stood before the clock, feeling the heat of the fire on his legs less than the radiant brassy light that was reflected from the clock face. He reached up and touched it - traced the name engraved there beneath the winding holes.

Whirlaway.

There was no need to look round. The wall behind the clock contained a mirror in which he could see the whole room and the door to the hallway through which he had just passed. He pulled on a loop of string that was fastened around his neck, drawing a small brass winding key with odd ridges along its blunt snout from beneath the sodden linen of his shirt.

He placed the hollow end of the key into the right hand winding hole and turned it one full turn anticlockwise. The clock clunked. Alex took the key out and fitted it into the left hand winding hole and turned it one full turn clockwise. The face of the clock swung out towards him, bringing a dense mechanism of clockwork with it, spinning and ticking. He smiled, admiring the elegance of the piece. It was an early work, almost exuberant in its youthful vitality, but still perfect in every way.

Every way except one.

They were always in different places, carefully concealed from even the trained eye of a skilled clockmaker, but now that he had undone the hidden locking mechanism this one was obvious. A skinny, twitching balance wheel that protruded ever so slightly from the rest of the mechanism. He glanced up at the mirror and found himself to be alone still in the room. He took a deep breath and held it. Then, with the utmost care he laid the tip of a grimy finger on the curved blades of the tiny teeth.

The wheel stopped.

The clock ticked onwards without skipping a beat. Alex pushed down on the wheel, felt it give a little, then there was the tripping of a catch somewhere unseen and the wheel popped up out of the mechanism as if presenting itself. He drew it forth between finger and thumb. There was no time to study his prize. He slipped the cog wheel into the doubled over cuff of his red coat, shut the face of the clock again, withdrew the key and watched. The ticking of the mechanism stopped and then the hands of the clock began to move in a strange glide that was quite unlike their normal motion. The hour hand moved anti-clockwise. The minute hand moved clockwise. After a full sweep of the hours, the hands came to rest at a quarter past two, and then moved again, this time reversing their directions. Four times they passed across the face of the clock, each time stopping at a different place. After the fourth stoppage the hands swept onwards, both moving clockwise this time, until they showed the true hour, and the clock began to tick again, as if nothing had occurred.

He turned to find the footman standing in the doorway.

‘Admiral Turvey is here, sir,’ said the footman.

Alex studied the man’s face, but could not tell whether or not he had been discovered. He was adept at reading the faces of clocks, but the faces of men seemed always blank to him.

A rhythmic creaking sound came from behind the footman, as if the spars of an ancient ship were groaning in a heavy swell in the hallway and Alex watched as the weathered hulk of the admiral hove into view, spilling the footman into the room like a porpoise on his bow wave. Turvey towered in the doorway - a crag of dark rock looming out of a storm sea. Long grey hair fell to the broad shoulders of a navy blue coat that concealed a bulging waistcoat embroidered with golden thread. His legs were curiously lithe for such a man mountain and it seemed to Alex that without the support of a gnarled staff of silvered driftwood they would have been in danger of snapping beneath his great weight.

The admiral grunted and pointed at Alex with a sweep of his stick and to Alex’s astonishment his child like legs creaked and groaned beneath him as he did so.

‘Coldstream is it? Tall fellow. Bean pole. Doesn’t forget things. Whirlaway’s boy.’

Alex nodded. It was an accurate description.

‘You are half-drowned, sir. Were you wrecked upon my doorstep or did you swim here?’

‘I have walked here sir. These last two days from Cambridge. I had no money to take the stage any further.’

Admiral Turvey looked Alex up and down as if appraising him in a new light.

‘Walked is it? Well, take advantage of your legs while you have them, Coldstream. That is my advice. I used the legs that God gave to me to feed the gulls at Trafalgar.’

Alex tried hard not to stare as the admiral entered the room, swaying and creaking as he did so.

‘Your master built me these legs. Before he blew himself up that is.’

‘He did not.’

‘I assure you that he did, sir!’ thundered the admiral.

‘I was present at several most undignified fittings before he succeeded in progressing the blasted things to their present form.’

A maid arrived in the doorway, carrying a bale of dry towels. She stopped as she saw the quivering red jowls of the furious admiral.

‘Forgive me sir. I meant to say only that he did not blow himself up.’

‘This cold winter has kept us warm, Mr Coldstream, safe by our firesides, no sense in venturing across the channel out of campaigning season, eh? But winter is ended, Mr Coldstream. Winter is ended and we are not yet saved.’

‘Where did you serve?’

‘I am not a fighting man, sir.’

The Admiral pushed his face towards Alex, the distance between the tips of their noses, no wider than a fingertip. Alex could smell rum and the moulder of old age. ‘The devil you aren’t, sir. A man doesn’t have eyes like that without being on a battlefield and most men with such eyes have the decency to leave them closed beneath the mud thereof.’

‘I am not a soldier. I have never been in a battle. Not one with a name.’

The Admiral scowled and turned away, lurching towards a great oak sideboard that occupied most of one of the room’s long walls, his legs creaking and twanging as he went.

‘It seems to me that you have entirely too much history Mr Coldstream. It is unseemly in one so young, and ungracious in a man of your class.’

‘It seems he was one of your lot.’

Admiral Turvey met Alex’s hawkish gaze and drank.

‘Forgive me, sir. I do not understand you.’

‘A mathematickal Johnny. Good with figures. Artilleryman they say.’

‘Ah yes. The famous memory. I am told that you do not forget anything. Is that so?’

‘It’s true I have a keen memory for numbers, sir. And dates.’

The Admiral drained his glass and poured himself another without looking away from Alex for an instant.

Alex was not good at people.

‘It is not quite right that a man should remember everything. Still, it may prove useful.’

‘You are a Banksian then sir? Do you believe that chance alone separates men from the beasts? That we may be perfected by the role of a dice?’

‘Indeed no.’

‘I am glad to hear it!’

‘That is, I do not believe we may be perfected. It is certain that there is much chance involved in our make up.’

Turvey shook his head, though whether in disgust or dismay Alex could not fathom.

‘I do not like you, Mr Coldstream. Not at all. We are men of different centuries you and I, and I find it vexing that the world must pass into the hands of men like you.’

Turvey drained another glass and immediately refilled it.

‘Nevertheless, it seems it must. Those qualities in you that I dislike, nay despise, are the very ones that are sought,’ Turvey drank once more, but this time slowly and thoughtfully, ‘Admiral Collingwood asked me to find him an engineer.’

‘I assure you there are many better qualified than I who answer to that title. If it is indeed Admiral Collingwood who asks, then why does he not ask Stevenson?’

Admiral Turvey turned towards him with a thoughtful look on his face and then smiled a glistening, gap-filled smile.

‘Admiral Collingwood keeps his own counsel on these matters. He would say only that he required a young engineer, preferably one who spoke French and certainly one who wasn’t a dreamer.’

‘I dream.’

‘Really? Well, I am sorry to hear of it Mr Coldstream, very sorry indeed.’

‘I dream that I will find those who murdered my master.’

‘Oh well, that’s alright then. The Admiral’s precise words were \emph{no fantasies of clockwork castles. A certain healthy desire for vengeance shouldn’t be any obstacle to your taking the position. The admiral is not above that sort of thing himself you know.’

For the first time, Alex’s eyes seemed to focus on something nearer to him than the far distant horizon.

‘Forgive me sir. What exactly did you say the position was?’

‘I didn’t Mr Coldstream. It does not have a title as such. You might think of it as helping the Admiral with matters of an engineering nature. It seems that warfare is being brought into the nineteenth century. These steam contrivances we hear so much of have piqued the interest of certain of our admirals and generals. Cuthbert himself is no enthusiast you understand, but he does like to keep abreast of such things.’

‘He wishes are to use engines in warfare? But how, this is madness.

‘Every year Whirlaway himself would come and clean the blasted thing. Regular as clockwork, eh? A true craftsman, sir.’

‘You could spend the rest of your days cleaning Billy Whirlaway’s clocks for him, or you could do something of use to your king and your country. Believe me, Mr Coldstream, you are not the only one who would like to know exactly what happened to Whirlaway.’

‘And exactly what is it that you wish me to do?’

The admiral turned with two well aimed plantings of his stick and with much creaking and twanging from his legs.

‘And get yourself cleaned up man.’

‘Trust Collingwood. Ask him.’ That was the message that the clock had given to him and now it

because the thing that mattered most to him in the world was getting into the admiralty and because, until this night, of all the people in the world who might have had his master killed, it seemed to him that Admiral Collingwood was the most likely.

The Governess

The trap was William’s work. She knew that whilst it could have been either of the twins who had taken the leather whipcord from the toy whip and top and tied it at ankle height between the newel posts at the foot of the final gloomy flight of stairs that led to her room – where it was made quite invisible by the shadows thrown from the guttering candle stub by which she made her way – it could only have been William who had arranged a company of ten Prussian infantry standing smartly to attention, with rifles shouldered and bayonets fixed, four steps up at the place where her face would have struck had she been careless enough not to check for such hazards. She untied the whip and coiled the cord into a neat loop, then carried the toy soldiers from the step and placed them carefully on the high sill of the narrow window that looked on to the little landing, ready for her to return them to the nursery in the morning.

She allowed herself a brief smile as she climbed the last few stairs to her narrow room. William had become complacent in recent weeks. The creativity she had come to expect from him was fading. She knew that it was because she was no longer a meaningful victim. His mind was elsewhere now, expanding beyond the childish space of the nursery and into the new world of school where he and George were to be sent in just eleven long days time.

He was looking forward to it immensely.

And one week on Saturday he would be gone, cast into a huge pool of even bigger and more vicious bullies than he.

She was looking forward to it immensely.

There was one thing to be said for being a governess it was a respectable profession. That this was the only thing to be said for it had quickly become apparent to Isobel.

‘William, point the pistol at the floor and then place it gently on the rug.’

‘Do not be dramatic Miss Prentiss,’ said Lady Marchpane, ‘It is not a real pistol.’

‘I assure you it is.’

‘And where would the child have got a real pistol from?’ said Lady Marchpane with a snort.

‘I believe that he stole it from my room.’

‘Miss Prentiss, your work here has been unsatisfactory from the first, but it is difficult for me to believe that even you would leave such an item as a pistol lying around for the boys to play with.’

‘It was not lying around Lady Marchpane. It was locked in my room. William, however much you may enjoy hurting others, I do not think you are quite ready to kill. Put the pistol down on the rug.’

‘Surely, you are not now suggesting that William has loaded the pistol!’

‘No, Lady Marchpane.’

‘Well then, there is no need for this to continue. William, hand me that awful thing this minute.’

William swung the pistol round towards his mother as she advanced on him. His face a mask of horrified delight.

‘Stop! William has not loaded the pistol, Lady Marchpane, but nevertheless I assure you that it is loaded.’

‘And how could you know such a thing?’

‘Because I loaded it.’

Lady Marchpane stopped halfway between William and Isobel and turned to look at the governess with a look of blank incomprehension on her face.

‘You loaded it? You? You have been keeping a loaded pistol in your room?’

Isobel did not hear the shot. Instead there was a sudden transition from Lady Marchpane’s high-pitched incredulity, to a muffled far off whistling, the surge of adrenaline in her blood, the stinging sulphur smell filling her nostrils and, through the curling wisps of powder fog the sight of a saucer sized hole in the green wallpaper made ragged with shattered laths and plaster and horse hair.

‘Miss Prentiss, you will leave this house immediately.’

Whirlaway

Alex had foregone sleep many times in his life, but rarely had he foregone quite so much sleep and then been presented with quite such a comfortable environment in which to remedy the omission. The bed was a gigantic square of white which had been stuffed and then stuffed again with the softest down, and Alex felt all of the weight of his days on the road crashing upon him as he stumbled towards it.

For a long time he slept without dreaming.

Unheard, the clocks and bells of London muttered amongst themselves in the dank night. The rain, as if sleeping now itself after its former vigour fell softly against his window. But something woke within him at last, while his body slumbered on, and he found himself a child again in the workshop of the man who was to be his master.

Whirlaway studied his face for a good while. It suddenly occurred to Alex that the workshop was silent, a fact that he found strange.

‘Hold out your hands boy.’

Alex held out his hands and Whirlaway inspected them, not in the cursory way of Mr Prender, checking for dirty nails and ink spots, but carefully, finger by finger, pushing back and forth to the full extent of his reach and working each joint . When he had finished he looked up at Alex again with his strange eyes.

‘Something is troubling you. Now what could it be? Let’s see ‘Alex felt Whirlaway’s gaze pass right through him as if looking for the key to Alex’s soul somewhere in the space behind his eyes.

‘Ah. The clocks. You are wondering why the room is full of clocks and yet silent?’

Alex nodded.

‘Well, then, the answer is simple. It has been my good fortune to learn that sight is the least of the senses required by a clockman. Indeed one might almost say that being able to see the workings of a clock is a grave impediment.’

Alex looked, and looked again, and it was only then that he realised that the old man was blind.

‘Come then. They say you have a capacity for memory. Show me.’

Whirlaway turned and strode to his workbench, then sat at one of the two stools that stood there. There was no uncertainty in his movements, rather it was Alex who made his way to the bench with hesitant steps.

‘You are surprised to find that I am blind. Well, I too have memory. I remember where I left the stool standing. How many paces away the bench is. What the day sounds like when there is a fog. That is how I manage to make my way in the world. Now, sit down boy and watch.’

A clock stood on the bench. It was an ordinary looking thing. The mechanism was only a set of large wheels with clean lines and widely spaced teeth. Even to Alex’s untrained eyes it seemed almost crude in its simplicity, and yet beneath the grossness of its outer form, Alex knew that he was looking at an item of quality. There was no decoration to it, no filigree or inlay, and yet each piece had been exquisitely well made. There was no flashing, not a rough edge, or a scratch or a marks. Everything was smooth and clean and finished. Whirlaway reached forward with a winding key and put a half turn on the spring. The clock sprang to life. ‘The mechanism functions as you see. Now. Pay attention.’ Whirlaway drew the clock towards himself and let the tension out of the spring. Then he began to take the clock to pieces. He worked steadily, laying each piece out on a roll of dark blue baise that covered the end of the workbench where Alex sat. From time to time he reached forward and took a tool from the rack that was fastened to the wall behind the back edge of the bench, each time returning it with a flourish which, Alex supposed, was for his benefit. Because there were no clocks in the room that were running, and because Alex found himself in that state of intense concentration that came so readily to him and which excluded the world beyond the clock maker’s bench completely, he could not say how much time had passed when Whirlaway separated the final two components and laid them carefully upon the cloth.

‘Now then, boy. Can you put it together again?’

Alex nodded, then realised how foolish this gesture was in front of a blind man and he began to speak.

‘I heard you, boy,’ said Whirlaway, ‘just get on with it.’

Alex began and immediately felt nervous. He was confident that he could remember the sequence in which the pieces had been disassembled. He could see each part and sub-assembly clearly in his mind’s eye, but the feel of clockwork beneath his fingers was quite new to him and he realised that the ease with which Whirlaway had seemed to work had misled him. Alex moved slowly, trying to replicate the patterns that he remembered as carefully as he could. Whirlaway sat, with his head resting forward, thumb and finger pinching at the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed. Several times he gave an affirmative grunt as Alex completed a difficult assembly and once a derisive snort, as Alex tried to use too much force on a spindle already half-loaded with cog wheels that came apart in his hands and had to be begun again. Despite his concentration, Alex was painfully aware of the passage of time as he worked.

‘Is there light enough?’ Whirlaway asked as dusk began to fall outside. Alex nodded and worked on.

When at last he thought himself finished, he stood the clock carefully before Whirlaway, and became suddenly aware of a great tiredness that filled his whole being.

Whirlaway sat up and reached forward with his winding key, fitting it smoothly into the mechanism and giving it a half turn.

‘The proof of the pudding then Mr Coldstream,’ he said and withdrew the key.

The clock sprang into life once more, ticking and whirring, just as it had before, or so it seemed to Alex. Whirlaway sat and listened with his eyes closed, nodding gently to himself, tipping his head first to one side and then the other.

‘A noble effort Mr Coldstream. It is not perfect, not by any means, but we may make a clock man of you yet. Listen. Tell me what you can hear.’

‘Ticking.’

‘And?’

Alex listened harder. There was a loud ticking, perhaps once every half a second. Behind that there was a softer, faster ticking at a rate that Alex could not guess at, and behind that the tiniest of gentle clicks that syncopated with the first sound. Alex described all of these sounds to his new master. Whirlaway nodded. ‘Listen again. Deeper. Those are the sounds you expect to hear. Close your eyes and listen.’

Alex closed his eyes and visited each of the known sounds in turn memorising it completely and trying his best to exclude it from the greater sound. Then he heard it. A faint buzzing that grew in volume within the space of two of the loudest ticks before becoming almost inaudible again. It was as if the tiniest of flies had been trapped inside of the clock and was thrashing back and forth between the walls of the case, stopping for breath each time it struck a wall.

He described the insect to Whirlaway.

‘There is no fly trapped in the case boy, but there is a wheel that is not sitting truly upon its spindle. Now, begin again.’

He slept for a long time without dreaming. Then he slept for a long time and dreamt of the trial.

‘What is he saying Alex?’

Watt was screaming in his ear, but Alex could hardly hear him over the roar of the engine. He looked again towards where the other machine was matching them almost stroke for stroke, now slipping back, now surging forward. He felt the sharp pricking of sparks against his cheek as Dougal bent again to the work of feeding the ravenous firebox and he turned his head towards where Monsieur Montparnasse stood, grasping the gleaming levers of his monstrous creation in two clenched fists and screaming at them.

‘It’s French, sir!’

‘Aye, lad, I’m not stupid. Now tell me what he is saying.’

It was only because Alex was such a diligent student that he had spent quite so long in Lord Killarnock’s library and many, many long nights searching out long forgotten lexicons of idiomatic French in order to allow him to translate some of the more obscure passages that he was able now to understand those parts of Monsieur Montparnasse’s screaming that he could hear above the noise of both engines.

‘Um, it’s something like ‘May the best man win’.’

Watt wiped the filthy mire of soot and condensed steam from the glass of his goggles with his shirt sleeve, cupped the back of Alex’s head in his great calloused hand and drew it towards him until the grimy panes of their eye protection met.

‘Laddy, if you want to see what it’s like underneath yon bucket of bolts only say the word. Now tell me what he’s really on about.’

Alex gulped, ‘He’s asking about your mother. He wonders if she knows for sure who your father was. He suggests that your father might have been a Frenchman, or …’

The spanner flew from Watt’s hand, bounced twice along the boiler of the ‘Sans Pareil’ span over Montparnasse’s head and disappeared from view.

‘… something about a guinea pig sir. No wait, he’s saying something about your mother again, he says that he’s sorry he called her a whore,’

‘Aye well, at least he’s man enough to apologise,’

‘He says he doubts that she would ever have been able to make a living that way,’

‘Shovel like your life depended on it laddy because, so help me, it does!’

{[His last memory of Whirlaway being tortured]

the thumping of the legs of the chair on the floorboards as Whirlaway’s struggles became more desperate grew louder and louder. His dream brought him at last to where it always brought him, to where a part of him always was, whether waking or sleeping, to where the sightless eyes of a terrified man looked through the flames and through the smoke and deep into Alex’s soul. The noise of the thrashing chair legs pounded in his brain, drumming and drumming hold him there transfixed for what seemed an eternity until at last Alex awoke and found that the sound was real.

The Lantern Man

‘Mr Coldstream! Mr Coldstream! There is a gentleman to see you sir. He said that it was urgent and that we should wake you.’

The knocking at his door began again and Alex sat bolt upright in the bed, struggling to gather together the tattered fragments of his dreams.

‘What time is it?’

‘Almost three o’clock, sir.’

Alex tried to make sense of this. He had thought that he had dreamt for a long time, but now it seemed that he had scarcely slept for an hour.

‘It is Wednesday, sir,’ called the footman.

He looked about the room and found that it was exactly as he had left it, his ragged undershirt was still heaped on the floor beside the bed.

‘Good afternoon sir. A –’ the footman paused as if seeking the right word, ‘gentleman has called on you and presented his card. He wishes to speak with you. He is most insistent.’

The footman handed Alex a small piece of yellow pasteboard. It was blank on both sides except for a small printed symbol:

?

Alex smiled. ‘Tell me, was the gentleman, unusually tall?’

‘I should say so, sir. Six feet he was and more.’

‘And was he wearing a scarf?’

‘Oh yes. I should think it was twice as long as he was sir. Wrapped round and round it was.’

‘Poynter’s Phantastical Projections or the Art of the Magic Lantern.’

‘But how did you know I was in London?’

‘Nose to the ground Alex! Percy Poynter’s great hooter stuck firmly to the ground, that’s how.’

‘No, I insist, you must come tonight. I shall be performing.’

‘Performing? Percy that’s wonderful news.’

‘Mr Trevithick is a cock!’ The crowd gasped as one and there was a clattering of trestle chairs from somewhere near its centre as one of the more tightly-laced young ladies swooned and several of the more gallant gentlemen rushed to her aid.

‘Yes, sir! A cock, sir! An insufferable strutting cock, crowing about what he claims to be his own achievement, but which is in fact the work of the minds of others.’

{[The Lantern Show]

‘Bloody Byron! Damn his dead bloody eyes! He owed me five guineas!’

Poynter threw his head back and drained the last of the wine. He flung the bottle from him with a great sweep of his arm. The bottle struck the cushioned seat of the chaise long, bounced, and then fell to the floor where the two men watched it as it rolled to a gentle stop before the fireplace.

‘See! I’m so hopeless I can’t even create a mess any more, I’m spent Alex, bloody spent!’

‘It’s like this. See, this? This place?’ cried Poynter waving his arms wildly. He leaned in very close to Alex and his voice dropped to a whisper, ‘Don’t you see old friend? You can gild a shell. Oh, yes! Yes, you can,’ he nodded furiously to himself, smiling as if in an ecstasy of inner certainty, ‘But you can’t gild a turd, Alex. Believe me. I have tried.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘Not as drunk as I intend to be.’

Poynter, always full of dreams, seizing on any fragment of news that came to their muddy little corner of England on the stage from London, devouring each new book of poetry or history, wildly extrapolating, furiously thinking himself away. And Alex, following along behind, the good listener with only half his mind tipped in Percy’s direction and the rest lost in some cool world of white shadows tinkering with equations and vast machineries of imaginary clockwork.

‘Poetry is dead, Alex. It’s all rot. All of it. Lanterns are the future man, lanterns!’

‘A fire engine capable of moving at a rate of perhaps thirty miles an hour.’

‘Thirteen miles an hour? What rot!’

‘No sir, you have heard me wrong. I say thirty.’

‘Meanwhile,’ roared Poynter ‘at the allied headquarters in Brussels, the Duke of Wellington is planning some manouevres. The crowd roared with laughter as the curtain fell away to reveal the front of a large town house with lights burning in all of its windows. In the top storey a silhouette of the duke chased a pair of nubile silhouettes from one end of the building to the next.

Oh, for the battle now we’re ready,

We’re about to spring the trap,

But we’ll have to do it next week

Cos the Duke has got the clap!

There was more roaring, raucous laughter from the crowd. Alex winced, remembering a time not so very long ago when Poynter had read one of his real poems in the presence of John Keats and made him cry.

‘But Percy what about Utopia?’

Deep in the middle of a draught, Poynter snorted and foam ran from his nostrils. Forcing the ale down before he spat it out

‘It’s a dream Alex. Didn’t you know? Always was. What’s the bloody point of writing a poem about it when everything’s gone to hell and buggery in the world. Here’s Percy Poynter with his simply lovely Utopia when Percy Byshe Bastard Shelley has every mother’s son and daughter in London weeping over “The March bastard bleeding Homewards”.

‘Because I earn enough money to live. Because hundreds of people hang on my every word. Because I’m not dying in a garret in bloody Italy without a penny to my name, choking on my own bloody lungs. A man has to eat Alex. Surely even you know that by now.’

‘And then there’s Banks. Good old, Banks. Lovely, wonderful, fucking, Banksy.’

‘Do you know him?’ asked Alex.

Percy laughed in the high-pitched way that Alex had at long last learned was an expression of irony.

‘No, I don’t \emph{know him. The fucker’s dead. Wiped the rainbows from our skies and then carked it.’

‘I did not know you were also a student of botany, Percy.’

‘He wasn’t a fucking botanist. The man was a demon, no worse –’, Poynter drank, lifting his tankard so high that beer ran down his cheeks and chin and stained his collar, ‘–a \emph{mathematician. Turned us all to numbers, turned our damned souls into differential equations.’

Alex nodded, ‘Perhaps that is so. Not all such equations can be solved.’

‘For God’s sake man, I’m the poet. I’m the one that’s meant to have my head in the clouds, but that was always you wasn’t it. I’m the one with my feet rooted in the mud, slogging around with my doggerel, and you, you with your cast iron and your steam, you’re the one who’s dreaming.’

‘A true revolutionary would be working for the bloody French.’

‘And now Mr Trace will read us some poetry.’

‘For God’s sake kill us all now and save and us the inconvenience of it.’ said Percy loudly.

The man called Mr Trace ignored him and cleared his throat. Alex saw Percy’s jeering face draw downwards into a mask of horror as he stared at the small green volume held in the quivering hands of Mr Trace.

‘Oh God, no. Please God, anything but that awful doggerel.’

Alex was about to remind Poynter of his avowed atheism but Mr Trace had begun the recitation:

‘Bent double, like old men under sacks ….’

‘Haven’t they had enough of it?’ seethed Percy, blinking through red eyes that were filling with drunken tears of rage and self pity. But Alex noted that he spoke quietly and that the background hubbub of the inn had ebbed away as the familiar words rang out.

‘As if a current under a dream sea had picked his bones in whispers. If you could walk beside me then, behind the cart where we threw him

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’

There was applause then, and some booing. A small scuffle in the corner was quickly brought to an end by a burly pot man.

‘Dying, Alex. It’s the only way to live forever. And dying in prison, moreover dying because you’re in prison because of your art - that’s the bloody genius of the man.’

‘Hello who is this?’

‘Who is who?’ But Alex had already followed the poet’s gaze and found himself entranced by the sight of the woman standing in the tavern doorway.

‘I think know that woman.’ he murmured.

‘Come now Coldstream, if you really knew that woman you would more than think it.’ said Percy draining the remaining half tankard of beer in a single gulp and wiping his mouth with a greasy sleeve without once taking his eyes from her, ‘I should say that I should like to know her though. I think I should like that very much.’

‘She seems familiar to me. I cannot say how. It is the strangest thing.’

‘Ah my dear Alex, things are always strange with you. It is your greatest charm.’ ______

The Gilded Shell

Isobel was not sure where she was going, but she only knew of one other place in London and so she went there.

In London, it was not the done thing for a respectable lady to enter a tavern, and certainly not on her own. Isobel had never considered herself to be a lady, and in her experience respectability was only a matter of opinion. The tavern had another name painted on its sign, but she knew it for what it really was, The Gilded Shell.

It was her father who had taught her to shoot, but her mother who had taught her to drink.

Of the two skills, it was drinking that she was called upon to use more frequently.

The man was gaunt. Isobel knew that he was hungry. Food was expensive in England, a scarce commodity that was valued by those who could afford it and fiercely coveted by those who could not. She knew how desperate hungry men could be, and yet she knew also that she was not hungry, that despite the other privations of her post she had been fed, if not well, then adequately. She knew that she was stronger than the man, and faster.

‘Spare a penny for an old soldier, miss?’

He came shambling towards her with his hand outstretched, but he was moving too fast, approaching too directly, his true intent revealed. He had no thought of stopping to receive alms, he had committed himself to taking everything that she had. She drew the pistol from beneath her shawl. For a moment his advance faltered and his face fell into a look of doubt. Then he stopped and leered at her, a broken smile of yellowed teeth and their black absence.

‘You stupid bitch, you’re holding it at the wrong end. I know things like that see, I used to be a soldier.’

She knew that he would choose that moment to strike and as he lunged clumsily towards her, she took a single step to her left and swung the pistol hard towards him in a smooth arc. The heavy wooden butt of the weapon struck him above the left temple where his lank hair was plastered by the rain. He fell to the street as if he had been dropped there from a height. Isobel put the pistol away again beneath her shawl and pushed gently at the man’s head with the toe of her boot so that she could see his face. Blood was streaming from his head and mixing with rivulets of soft rain. It slicked across the greasy cobbles. It seemed to her that the blood was somehow darker even than the night street because it carried colour into a place where there was none. The man was still breathing.

‘It \emph{is you!’

‘I’m afraid you are mistaken sir.’

‘No, you are Elodie.’

A look of such anguish crossed her face that Alex felt as if he had been struck a blow on his chest.

‘You are mistaken sir.’

She raised the hood of her cloak and turned away, disappearing into the night and the rain, leaving Alex feeling as blasted and empty as a forgotten battlefield.

‘Hurry up please, it’s time! Time at the bar please!’

##Himavant

‘Now, Alex, come along. We’ve all had a drink.’

‘I’ll swear it was her. Her name is Elodie.’

‘And yet she said otherwise.’

‘We must follow her.’

‘Don’t be a damn fool, it’s raining and I’m hungry, moreover people have been reciting poetry at me!’

‘Come on.’

Alex ducked through the low doorway out into the cool spring night. The rain fell softly, deadening the sounds of the street.

‘Which way did she go? Did you see?’ Alex demanded.

‘That way. Past the undertakers,’ said a reluctant Poynter as he wound the pythonic length of scarf about his neck and shoulders.

Alex set off at a trot.

‘What if it is her?’ said Percy hurrying to keep up.

‘What?’

‘I mean, so what if it is her. She either doesn’t recognise you, or doesn’t want to speak to you, what does it matter. Who is she anyway?’

‘She is – I am not sure I remember quite rightly who she is.’

‘I thought you never forgot anything.’

‘No. I only remember those things that I have understood.’

‘Aha! So you could in fact be mistaken about her.’

‘I am not.’

‘There’s the Alex I know, riven by doubt.’ Poynter fished a crust of pastry from the pocket of his overcoat, studied it for a moment and then discarded it into the gutter. ‘Elodie is a French name.’

‘Yes.’

‘And that would make her French then? Or at least a tadpole.

‘What?’

‘Born to frogs.’

Alex stopped dead, looked about himself as if bewildered and then ducked into a narrower street to his right, tugging Poynter with him by his scarf.

‘The latter. She was orphaned by the war.’

‘Well that makes her almost unique amongst \emph{les enfants, then doesn’t it? No wonder you have such an interest in her. For God’s sake man, slow down! HMS Poynter is carrying a large cargo of ale and in danger of springing a leak. In fact ­–’

Alex cursed beneath his breath as Poynter stopped and began to relieve himself with his forehead propped against the grimy brick of an alley wall. Steam twisted about his boots.

‘So she had people in England then? One of the quality is she?’ he called over his shoulder.

‘There were no people. Just a person.’

Alex felt his anger growing, quite certain that Poynter was in the process of eliminating a far greater volume of liquid than he had imbibed, ‘You are like a camel, man. God’s hell, where is it all coming from?’

‘Every man must have his talents, Alex. This is mine.’

‘Do you mean in addition to being the greatest poet of the age?’

The endless spattering began to falter, ‘So who was this person?’

‘Who?’

‘You said no people, just a person.’ There was silence at last from the foaming gutter.

‘Killarnock.’

‘Oh I see. Another of his lordship’s waifs and strays is it?

‘Alex, damn your eyes, I’m hungry. There’s a marvellous place I know, just around the corner from here. A johnny from the East India Company runs it. Taste of the orient, that sort of thing. Run by Hindoos, exotic spices, just the thing to cheer a man up.’

‘Chutney?’

‘And what is chutney?’

‘It is a kind of pickle or relish.’

Alex was used to plain fare. On occasion he had indulged in pickled vegetables. Once, in a tavern in Edinburgh, he had been served mustard.

He looked over to where Poynter was blinking ferociously, tears streaming from his red eyes as he panted for breath, ‘This is the stuff. This is what makes a man feel alive!’ he wheezed.

‘Ah, Mr Boswell!’

‘Boswell?’

‘Yes sir, that is my name.’

‘If there was the sound of water only.’

‘The cricket, no relief, sir.’

‘Now then, tell me more about what happened to poor Billy Whirlaway.’

‘He talks to you through clocks?’

‘I can speak no more of it Percy. I made a promise.’

‘Mr Boswell, it is time for the speciality of the house.’

‘Very good sir.’

Mr Boswell disappeared behind the bejewelled curtain.

‘What is the speciality of the house, Percy?’

‘Chicken Boswell. It is like nothing you have ever tasted before.’

‘And what is it made from, apart from the obvious?’

‘Obvious? There is nothing obvious about the Chicken Boswell.’

‘Indeed. Do you mean to say that there is, in fact, no chicken in it?’

‘Something of that, Alex, something of that. Mr Boswell keeps the true ingredients secret.’

‘I see.’

‘But it matters not what the meat might or might not be. It is the spice that is the thing. Chicken Boswell contains spices that are truly exotic. Fabulously rare.’

‘And what does it taste like?’

‘Ah, Alex, my dear friend. You call me the greatest poet of the age, and yet even I cannot find words to describe it. Perhaps it is as if your tongue was taken from your head and embarked upon a great adventure across all the world, that it tasted calico from a sail darkened with powder and beech smoke at Trafalgar, that it swam in great vats of rubbing alcohol infused with saffron, that it crept one painful half inch at a time through the roiling slag and char of a pig iron smelter, that it rolled with glee in honey and took langorous baths in sloe gin, that it picked its way across holly and hawthorns and clothed itself in the fat of a great sea Leviathan. But only perhaps. I find a little salt sometimes helps to lift it.’

Alex prodded at the yellow skin of the dish. Something dark with streaks of purple in it rolled lazily to the viscous surface and then sank again. Alex plunged his fork after it and withdrew a shapeless form that was smeared in the sauce that seemed now to Alex to be somehow faintly luminous. The inside of his nose began to tingle as steam from the thing on his fork rose towards him. That part of his brain that was stubbornly logical and which usually had the last word in situations of indecision began to remind him that he had already made the decision to eat the Chicken Boswell and that further delay was pointless. Alex put the fork in his mouth.

Time stopped …

A thought occurred to him that he was well pleased with. He realised, as if for the first time, what a wonder it was that he was precisely the right size and shape to fit into his own skin.

… and began again

\emph{But we’ll have to do it next week

Cos the Duke has got the clap!

He was standing in the middle of a dark street, the rain hanging in the air around him in a fine drizzle. Percy stood a few paces away, arms outstretched holding an earthenware bottle in one hand and singing to the hidden stars.

‘Percy.’

‘What is it old chum?’

‘What happened?’

‘What happened when?’

‘The speciality of the house. Chicken Boswell. I mean, I remember that I was eating the Chicken Boswell and now I am here.’

‘Back with us old man? Good show! First time is always touch and go.’

‘Percy, no I mean Percy, who is that who is walking beside you?’

Poynter stopped for a moment and swayed and looked about him, ‘It’s you, you bloody idiot.’

‘No, no. I mean I’ve counted. And you know. \emph{Do you know? I’m rather good at counting and when I count there are only you and I together, but when I look ahead,’ said Alex gesturing with a grand sweep of his arm, ‘There’s another one walking beside you. Behind you. Back there in the shadow, I’m positively sure there is another one.’

Percy looked Alex up and down seriously for a moment. Then he began to laugh.

The Lady Of Situations

‘What time is it?’

‘Almost three o’clock, sir.’

A dim question began to form itself in his mind.

‘It is Thursday, sir.’

‘The admiral gave instructions that you were to be made ready for the admiralty ball sir. The admiral’s tailor is ready to attend you and make measurements.’

‘Remarkable what a splash of water and a new suit of clothes can do for a man, eh Coldstream?’

‘This is my niece, Emma.’

‘The carriage will be here at any moment. Poll hates to be late to the admiralty.’

‘“Poll” is Lady Jane Montague, Mr Coldstream. The daughter of Rear Admiral Montague.’

His knowledge of how to behave in such situations was limited, but he was dimly aware that it was accepted practice to allow ladies to enter a carriage first.

‘Poll!’

Emma flung herself at Lady Jane Montague, again forcing Alex to lurch backwards or find his face buried in the white satin of her behind.

‘Carriages can be such a terrible squeeze don’t you find Mr Coldstream?’ said Emma and wriggled in the narrow space that was afforded to her. Alex tried to make more room for her, but found that his only recourse was to try and make himself thinner. Failing at this he found himself forced to consider the subject of women for the first time in many years.

‘Oh Topsy, do stop fidgeting! You get so giddy when there are sailors promised.’

Emma settled herself at last with a satisfied squirm that left her leaning into Alex and with her thigh pressed tightly to his. Alex who was accomodating the nearby knees of Lady Jane Montague found himself unable to move at all.

‘I do believe that if Mr Coldstream wasn’t so devilishly thin I would be a good deal more comfortable,’ announced Emma.

‘Topsy, if there was any meat on him, there’d be no room for you at all.’

The two women giggled together and Roger Montague stirred, sat suddenly upright, looked about with wild eyes, took a swig from the bottle that he was still holding and slumped back into his corner, once more asleep.

Emma leaned forward, placing a hand on Alex’s far knee to steady herself and flicked out her fan with a conspiratorial air, ‘Poll, you don’t think Roger will get himself into another duel do you? I do worry about him so.’

Lady Montague giggled. Alex found himself examining Emma Turvey’s naked shoulders at very close quarters. The unfamiliar smell of scent and powder rose from her. He forced himself to look away from the bare flesh and found instead the place at the nape of her neck where a curl of hair had come free from its tight fastenings and lay against the glowing skin like a question mark or a beckoning finger.

‘Do you duel, Mr Coldstream?’

‘I have never yet been in a position where that has been necessary, Lady Montague.’

‘Never yet?’ said Lady Montague, raising one eyebrow so far from its usual mooring that Alex had to struggle to stop himself from staring.

‘That is to say –’ Alex began, but found himself cut short as the carriage rattled over a pot hole in the road and Emma lost her balance and fell into his lap. The carriage rumbled onwards, rocking and swaying over rough ground and it took several attempts for her to find a suitable handhold on Alex’s leg and right herself once more. She dropped back into her seat, flushed in the face and fanning herself vigorously.

‘I say! I do believe that a little meat might be found on Mr Coldstream after all, Poll!’

{[Description of the admiralty]

… an overwhelming, dazzling spectacle of light, colour and movement that immediately overwhelmed the capacity of Alex’s mind to process such things and left him staring at the whirling frenzy of it all.

‘These things can be so terribly dull don’t you find?’

‘I’m afraid I really couldn’t say. This is the first ball I have been to.’

‘Oh!’ her dark eyes flashed with excitement and she rounded on him, ‘Do forgive me Mr Coldstream, you must forgive me my ennui. It is quite fashionable this season, and one must keep up with fashion, don’t you think?’

‘Quite,’

‘Now, Mr Coldstream, I have just had a terribly good idea,’she flicked her fan and looked around with a conspiratorial air, before drawing very close to him and placing a slender, gloved hand on his chest, ‘perhaps we can be of the greatest service to each other. I will share with you the secrets of surviving a ball as tedious as this one. I have had a lot of practice at it I’m afraid.’

‘And what shall I do in return?’

‘Oh!’ she clapped her hands in excitement, ‘Well Mr Coldstream we shall simply have to think of something won’t we?’

‘Have you heard about Collingwood’s column?’

‘The most magnificent in London.’

‘Yes, and I hear they are to build a statue of him too.’

Alex stared in wonder at the sight before him. Sat behind a baise covered card table of the sort at which one might normally have found a game of bezique in progress was an incredibly ancient looking woman, dressed in a strange loose fitting robe of deep emerald green. About her head she wore a length of green silk wound into a kind of turban and fastened at the front with a curious silver brooch in the shape of an eye.

‘Ah, now that is Madame Sosostris.’ said Emma as she followed Alex’s open mouthed gaze

‘Madame Sosostris?’

‘Yes, the famous clairvoyant. They say she is the wisest woman in all Europe.’

‘She seems unwell.’

They watched as the old woman blew her nose on a huge linen handkerchief which she then handed to a dark-skinned footman who stood in attendance behind her.

‘Apparently she has a terribly wicked pack of cards that can tell the future. They call it the \emph{tarreau. She has been to all of the best salons this season. It’s ever so much fun.’

Emma’s face lit up as if an idea had suddenly occurred to her, ‘Oh -­-‘

‘I do not think –’ said Alex, but it was far too late, she had already dragged him to the front of the circle of interested onlookers who were politely applauding the latest reading.

‘Do him. He’s an \emph{enigma.’ Emma announced. Alex felt the eyes of the crowd turned on him and he heard muttered snatches of conversations that seemed to suggest that Emma’s appraisal of him was finding popular support. Madam Sosostris fixed Alex with a beady glare. She stroked the pack briskly with gnarled fingers as if it were some sort of impatient pet.

‘Hmph, zis man stands upon too many paths. Three cards only.’

Alex looked about, bemused. Emma clapped her gloved fingers together in excitement, and turned to him with eyes ablaze, ‘How thrilling Mr Coldstream, you are a man of mystery in the nether world.’

Before Alex could reply he felt Emma grab him tightly by the arm as she gave a little squeal.

‘Ze Tower.’

That didn’t seem so bad, Alex reflected, although the card itself showed the tower smitten by lightning, the topmost ramparts tumbling to the earth.

Emma gasped.

‘Ze Hanged Man.’

Alex realised that quite a large crowd was gathering to watch his cards being read.

‘Don’t worry,’ hissed Emma in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to hang. It’s all about interpretation.’

‘Doesn’t necessarily …’

Once, when a young boy Alex had seen a display of firework rockets to celebrate Cochrane’s successful rocket raid on Boulogne. He remembered how the crowd had gasped and sighed in wonder at each explosion. A similar sound enveloped him now as the third card was dealt.

‘Death.’

‘Ah, now. Look there.’

With a deft flick of her eyes and a flash of her fan Emma directed Alex’s attention towards a hugely fat man who was pondering a selection of canapés that were being held for his inspection on a silver tray by an impressively blank-faced footman.

‘That’s Monsieur Ouvrier. He’s a French spy.’

Alex studied the man’s sweat studded brow and ruddy cheeks in disbelief.

‘A spy? But what’s he doing here? I mean there’s admirals and generals and all sort of military talk. We must tell someone at once.’

Emma was giggling again, ‘Really Mr Coldstream, you have quite enlivened this evening for me though I do feel simply awful for making such fun of you. Everybody knows that he is a spy. Everybody except you that is. That is what spies are for.’

‘I had thought that spies sought to steal secrets for their governments. To help them in war and so forth,’ said Alex, determined not to get angry.

‘No, you are mistaken. You must be thinking of secret agents. Or journalists perhaps? Spies are simply a vessel in which important messages may be sent. A captain may be talking to a lieutenant within earshot of Mr Ouvrier and may let slip that an exercise of his regiment is to take place ..

It is simply how things work.’

‘But it is preposterous!’ fumed Alex.

‘General Janvier, one of Russia’s most decorated officers.’

{[Alex retrieves the last piece of the Whirlaway engine, the instructions that accompany it indicate that Collingwood cannot be Whirlaway’s killer. Alex is confused. ]

‘Ah, now that is Lord Bradford.’

‘Bradford?’ exclaimed Alex.

‘Why, Mr Coldstream, you seem positively animated.’

‘The man is a genius.’

‘Indeed.’

‘He invented the Bradford condensing engine.’

‘And who else could have done that?’ said Emma with a disapproving glance over her fan.

‘He built a tunnel under the Tyne made entirely from iron that is nearly half a mile long and leaks but a little.’

‘Yes. But he is not one of the quality. He is one of the low upon whom assurance sits.’ said Emma loftily.

Alex looked at her, dumbfounded. She giggled.

‘I am teasing you Mr Coldstream. Two hundred thousand pounds a year is sufficient for any woman to overlook matters of pedigree. Lord Bradford has sufficient quality to gain entrance to any salon in London. Would you like to meet him?’

{[Alex sees and possibly meets Lord Bradford]

‘Coldstream, is it? Apprenticed to my dear friend William. It is a tragedy of the first order sir. I will offer you my condolences, though I fear they will be of little worth.’

‘I am grateful for them, sir.’

‘Or of course, we could always see if there’s anything happening behind the curtains.’

‘Curtains?’

‘Oh yes. Terribly naughty things happen behind the curtains. It’s ever so funny.’

‘But –’

‘Let’s see, shall we?’

Emma led him to where a pair of scarlet curtains as tall as sails stood drawn across the bay of a window. She slipped between the curtain and the wall, drawing him with her into the cool dark space that lay behind. To Alex’s immense relief, there was no one else there. The noise of the ball was muffled by the great weight of material that hung between it and them. The air was cool and refreshing after the stuffy heat of the ballroom. The rain had stopped and Alex looked out through the glass across the city that lay before them, dark but faintly glowing like a coal upon a grate.

‘Shall we sit?’

Emma positioned herself primly on the cushioned window seat, and patted the space next to her.

Alex sat.

He realised that the evening had brought him so far beyond the reach of his experience that he was now in danger of falling off the edge of his new world like a sailor in the days before the Clock.

‘I must thank you for your help this evening, Miss Turvey. I do not think I should have been able to navigate my way without it. I am an engineer. I understand mechanisms. People do not have mechanisms and so I confess that I do not understand them at all.’

Emma giggled, ‘Oh Mr Coldstream, you are quite wrong. People do have mechanisms. It is true that they may sometimes seem complicated but in my experience the machinery of men is usually very simple.’

‘Really? I do not think that can be true. I think that you ­- oh.’

‘You seem a little agitated, Mr Coldstream.’

‘Miss Turvey, I do not think that this is quite proper.’

‘On the contrary Mr Coldstream, it would be quite unforgivable of me to let you attend your interview with the Admiral in such a distracted condition. Do not concern yourself. It is as I said, the mechanism is simple. It is well suited to manual operation.’

‘I rather think - haah.’

The back of his head struck the window.

‘I believe I shall shortly have need of your handkerchief, Mr Coldstream.’

Alex looked at her with glazed eyes and patted feebly at the pockets of his coat.

‘Your handkerchief?’

‘Hng.’

Emma made a small tutting noise as if exasperated by a child and then dropped from Alex’s hazy view.

It was only diligent study of the second Earl of Killarnock’s journals that allowed Alex to understand that what happened next was real and not the product of his fevered mind. He felt as if he were falling. There were perfect flashes of clear memory. The trials. Bracken covered hills near his childhood home. Then nothing. His mind quite free of any thought.

Emma reappeared before him. He saw with surprise his own hand holding out his handkerchief to her, realising that in his delirium he must finally have located it.

She took it from him and frowned reproachfully before dabbing at the corner of her mouth, ‘A gentleman should always know where his handkerchief is Mr Coldstream.’

..and into the presence of the admiral.

Admiral Collingwood

Collingwood stood at a great table spread with charts and surrounded by a tight knot of sharp looking men, their faces all animated with some hard fought debate.

‘So this is Whirlaway’s boy is it? Coldstream.’

If any man there had been ignorant of Alex’s true name and had later been asked to record that name on paper for the sake of posterity based only on Admiral Collingwood’s pronunciation of it, then Alex was certain that future historians would have found it rendered Curledstream. The Admiral’s accent was at once the familiar sound of his home and yet still strange to his ears.

Collingwood moved away from the table with the charts, the knot of commodores and captains opening before him as if flotsam on the stately bow wave of a great ship.

He stopped and looked Alex up and down, then nodded thoughtfully. Alex knew with certainty that there was no artifice in Collingwood’s manner. It was clear to him that the grey haired man with the craggy face standing not two paces before him was the master of everyone in that place and had no need to

‘A north country boy then. London is no place for men such as us Mr Coldstream. Whenever I think how I am to be happy again, my thoughts carry me back to Morpeth. Is there rum for Mr Coldstream, Captain Frost?’

‘The herl wealth of this kingdom is built upon cerl. Cerl and the ships that carry it Mr Cerldstream.’

‘What Mr Cerldstream, would you place your damned infernal fire engines inside my wooden ships?’ asked Collingwood with eyes open in mock horror. The little group of officers guffawed politely. ‘There is ner need. Ner need at all. We have ner shortage of men to wind our capstans and raise our anchors I assure you. It is officer mettle we lack as I have often said.’

‘Oh no, something much better than that. The ship itself could be propelled by a steam engine attached to a suitable fitment submerged in the water. A sort of water wheel in reverse perhaps. It would serve to power the ship when the wind was against it or even if it was entirely lacking. I see no reason why a suitably powerful engine could not replace sails altogether.’

Collingwood’s mocking look changed to become one of genuine horror and his face began to change colour. It suddenly occurred to Alex exactly what kind of a man it was who could rise to become the head of the most ruthless and most capable fighting force in the whole world.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Collingwood laughed.

‘Mr Coldstream is having a little joke with us gentlemen.’

‘And what do you think our friend monsieur Bonaparte is doing now Coldstream?’

‘I must confess that I have given it little thought sir.’

‘Fortunately for you Mr Coldstream there are those of us who must give it a great deal of thought. A great deal of thought indeed. And Bonaparte thinks sir, and he plots and broods. But what is he thinking? What thinking? What? That is the question on which we ponder night and day.’

‘Indeed sir. Then you must have a good understanding of his schemes.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Collingwood thoughtfully, ‘What we can say is that all his thoughts and all his failing energies are directed against this island of ours. Yes sir, he is brooding and, to our eternal misfortune, he seems to have found a quite moment to engage in some breeding.’

Rum.

‘You are speaking of Lucien’

‘That whelp? Don’t be ridiculous man! He struggles to conquer his own stammer let alone the rest of Europe. No Mr Coldstream, Bonaparte’s true heir is Beatrice. A creature of pure evil brought up in a poisonous miasma of hatred and thwarted ambition. She is Napoleon’s heir in every conceivable way.’

‘But she is just a child.’

‘she is not, Mr Coldstream, she is the very devil incarnate and soon to be the greatest misfortune ever to befall our great nation.’

‘Forgive me sir, but I had the great good fortune to meet Lord Bradford earlier this evening. It seems to me that if you require an opinion on an engineering matter then you could do no better than to seek his.’

‘I trusted William Whirlaway and because I trusted him and he, evidently for reasons of his own that I have yet to fathom, saw fit to trust you. It is not to be underestimated in this world of ours Mr Coldstream. Trust.’

A short officer stationed himself at Alex’s right elbow and began to speak.

{[Official Secrets Act]

‘Stetson, there’s no need for all of that, just show him the blasted things’

The officer called Stetson looked so unhappy then, that for a moment Alex thought he might actually begin to cry. Instead he seemed to manage to pull himself together

‘What do you make of this then, Mr Coldstream?’

Collingwood pulled the topmost chart from the table and flung it to the floor where one corner of it caught light from the fire in the grate. A naval officer of a rank that Alex thought might have been a lieutenant discretely slid the chart from the fire and began to smother the flames with his boot. Alex did not see the flames on the map put out entirely though for his whole attention was suddenly focussed on the papers that Collingwood had revealed and was now stabbing at angrily.

‘Well?’

Alex stared. The papers were covered with technical drawings. The sheer quality of the workmanship before him left him speechless. He heard sniggering from the group of officers behind him and realised that he must actually have sighed in the presence of such beauty.

‘Wonderful. Just wonderful.’

‘That’s as maybe, Mr Coldstream, but what sort of a wonderful thing is it.’

‘Oh. It’s some sort of an engine.’

‘Even a man of my advancing years and brine-rinsed brain can see that Mr Coldstream. I wish for you to tell me precisely what sort of an engine it is.’

‘Well, lets see then, the valve work here is quite marvellous, and the precision of these fitments is … these measurements cannot be in inches.’

‘Indeed they are not, Mr Coldstream.’

‘These are measurements of the metric system. These drawings are French.’

‘That would be a reasonable assumption.’

Alex shuffled the papers in order to understand them better, cross-checked from one to the next muttering to himself as he did some rough arithmetic and then squeezing the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, eyes closed as he calculated furiously. His eyes snapped open and he scoured the drawings before him, his nose passing just inches above the paper.

‘Missing. There is a sheet missing.’ he said.

‘It is our understanding that the design is complete.’

Alex ran a hand through his hair and shook his head, then began to dig through the drift of charts beneath the drawings. Beneath a map of Albemarle he found what he was looking for and returned the missing sheet to the surface. He rearranged the drawings quickly and stood back from the table to view his work.

‘Oh.’

He laid one hand flat on the drawing at the centre of the design. He drew his fingers together in a caress that became a fist which he struck softly against the side of his head. Then he stood and turned to face a bemused Collingwood.

‘There was Fulton’s work of course, but this is something of another order altogether.’

‘Has this been built?’

‘so there is room for passion in those eyes, Coldstream. That is a good thing. A man without passion is like a ship without sails.’

‘Admiral. Has this engine has been built.’

‘That is a very important question Mr Coldstream and one we must have the answer to. In the meantime perhaps you can tell us what purpose it has?’

Alex shook his head sadly, ‘I cannot say.’

‘I confess I find your answer a little disappointing, Mr Coldstream. Perhaps you could explain just what it is about this gewgaw that you find so moving.’

‘How powerful?’

‘I cannot say for sure. More powerful by far than any engine yet built. And the size of it … It is inconceivable.’

The room had grown very quiet. Alex felt almost as if he and Collingwood were alone together. The admiral had drawn very close to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. He looked at Alex with eyes that were steady but which he knew were now afloat in rum.

‘Mr Coldstream you have been of good service to me this evening,’ said the Admiral and fixed him with an iron stare that would have stopped a ship of the line in full sail, ‘Now I would ask more of you.’

Alex nodded stiffly, he did not know what to say.

‘We believe that the French have made great advances in this field. Have overtaken us in but a matter of months or years, we know not how. Mr Coldstream, in rooms such as this and at tables such as this one powerful men talk in fearful voices of late. Always there is one fear at their shoulder. Always they mutter of the Engine Gap. They say that we are outpaced, that iron ships and fire engines will smash their way through the wooden walls that protect us, that traction engines will crush English fields beneath their iron wheels on the way to London, that balloons steered against the wind by the power of steam will fill our skies with French muskets. Men think in strange ways when they are scared, Mr Coldstream, and men do strange things. Until these drawings were brought to me I thought that such talk of the engine gap was idle nonsense. My greatest fear has always been that fear itself will drive us into the rash act, that we will lose our heads and our reason. Now it seems that after all, there is some basis to these fears. We must know the truth of it. We must know what the French are now capable of, what engines they have constructed and what they plan to use them for.

‘What would you have me do, sir?’

‘We need a man with an engineering eye to look over some machinery that we believe to be of French origin. Real machinery, not plans.’

‘I will gladly give you my opinion sir, though I would ask why you feel my opinion is to be given such weight. Surely in a matter as vital as this one you might prevail upon Mr Stevenson, or even Lord Bradford himself to help you.’

‘I might, but I will not.’ Collingwood looked around the room as if making certain that he recognised all of the occupants, ‘Men think in strange ways when they are scared, Mr Coldstream, especially when they are scared and are not accustomed to being scared. It is my belief that Lord Bradford is scared and that he has scared all save a few of the engineers in this kingdom.’

‘Sir, I am not sure that I understand you.’

‘I think perhaps that you do Mr Coldstream, nevertheless, I will not press any more of my idle speculation upon you. I will say only that your master was not in thrall to fear, nor indeed to Lord Bradford and neither, I am pleased to discover, are you. If your master had lived, I would have sought his help. As it is, I have sought yours.’

‘Sir, I would gladly help you, but I have urgent business of my own to attend to.’

‘Urgent? What can be more urgent than the defence of the realm, sir?’

‘Indeed it may not be, your Lordship, at least not in the wider scheme of the world, but I was given a commission by Master Whirlaway as he lay dying, and I intend to see that it is completed as he wished.’

‘Indeed? And what manner of commission was it that Whirlaway gave to you?’

It was Alex’s turn to look around the room to inspect those present, ‘Sir, I cannot tell you, at least not until I know more myself. My efforts so far have led me to you. It is my hope that you can help me fulfil my master’s dying wish.’

‘Well, then. It seems we have the makings of a bargain Mr Coldstream. I will undertake to help you in any capacity I can, if you will undertake to give us your engineer’s opinion on the French machinery. We should not detain you from your endeavours for more than a day or two.’

‘A day or two?’

‘Indeed, the machinery is located some way outside of London for sound reasons as I’m sure you will appreciate. When you return, I will help you as I have promised.’

Alex felt a strange confusion within. He was so close to his goal, so close to discovering exactly what it was that his master had died to protect, but now he had to turn away from it. He knew that he had no choice. He could not proceed without Collingwood’s help.

‘I will do as you ask, sir. I am sure that my master would have wished it so.’

‘Good, that is settled then. Stetson, more rum for Mr Coldstream! let us drink to our bargain, and then there is someone I would very much like you to meet.’

##The Coast Of Iron And Bronze

When Alex awoke his mind was very clear and very still. He reached for memory and found none. He knew only that he lay on an uncomfortable and unfamiliar bed. He sat up and looked out through a small round window. The dark grey horizon sloped considerably upwards to his right. He watched for a moment as the slope of the horizon lessened, then raised itself considerably upwards to his left.

Then he threw up.

After several very unpleasant minutes he made his way out of the cabin on all fours and up onto the deck. He flung his arms over the nearest rail and closed his eyes to shield himself from the sight of the surging grey mass of the sea as his body purged itself of rum, sugar coated dates and the last shreds of his tattered dignity.

‘Good morning! Lovely day for it isn’t it?’

Alex peered through watering eyes, trying to make out details of the grey shape that had spoken to him.

‘I’m afraid I don’t …’

He sagged back over the rail losing himself to the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell as he retched and retched and retched again. After a while he began to console himself with mathematics. He started from the undeniable engineering fact that his stomach had only a finite capacity and then proceeded to prove mathematically, and much to his own satisfaction, that his predicament could not go on forever.

At last, he drew himself upright once more.

‘Look to windward Mr Coldstream, that’s the way. Some salt air on your face will see you right in short order.’

Lounging a little way along from him, against the rail of what Alex could now see was a ship of no great size, was a stockily built man with auburn hair and ruddy cheeks who was a good deal shorter than Alex and a great deal more cheerful.

‘Forgive me, I am afraid we have not been introduced, sir.’said Alex weakly.

The man laughed. It was an unusually loud laugh that would have been unpleasant and ill-mannered under any circumstances but which Alex found particularly objectionable given the uncertain state of his constitution.

‘I’m damned if we haven’t, sir!’

He laughed again, and thrust out his hand, ‘Good man! Good man! A night that one can remember clearly is a night thoroughly wasted. I am Peregrine Turnstile, as I explained to you last night.’

‘Last night?’

‘At the admiralty. Cuthbert himself entrusted me with your care. We drank a toast or two of that wretched navy rum.’

Dim memory stirred.

‘You are the secret agent?’

‘Not really a secret if you go around shooting your mouth off about it is it, old man? Remember that. Speaking of which I distinctly remember the admiral telling me that you never forget anything. Damned useful trick I thought, though now it seems you are unable to recollect anything of the evening just passed.’

‘It is the drink, sir. I am not used to it.’

‘Good job we got shot of that rum and stuck to the clean stuff. It can punch a good hole in the old recollection though, I’ll give you that.’ Turnstile pulled a hip flask from his pocket and took a swig from it before thrusting it at Alex.

‘Fancy a drop?’ The faintest whiff of vodka reached Alex’s nostrils and he wrestled for control of his insides.

‘Got a taste for it in Russia. Was out there for a while during the last set to. Bloody good sport.’

Alex nodded grimly, his teeth clamped together. His understanding was that the most recent Russian campaign was generally agreed to have been extremely bloody, but ‘good sport’ was a phrase one seldom heard used in connection with it.

‘We appear to be on a boat,’ gulped Alex before clenching his teeth again quickly.

‘Sharp fellow! That’s the ticket. Powers of observation. Important. Stand us in good stead when we get to France.’

‘France?’

Turnstile gave him a strange look, ‘Of course France. That’s where the bloody French are and their bloody engines.’

‘But the admiral, he said -‘ Alex tried to recall clearly the conversation he had had with Collingwood.

‘What did he say, old chap?’

‘He said that the engines were located some distance from London.’

‘Indeed. And here we are. Some distance from London and a little further to go. With luck and a fair wind we shall find ourselves back in Whitehall by nightfall tomorrow.’

‘I do not feel well.’

‘Wages of sin, old chap. Wages of sin. A bloody good night like last night? Well worth it. I won the Duke of Norham’s daughters in a poker game, do you remember? Twin sisters. Gave the naughty one to you. Jolly decent of me.’

‘Oh God. Please tell me that I did not.’

‘Could not more like it. Had to take them both on myself. Spirited pair, though in my experience the notion of sisters is always more appealing than the reality.’ ‘falls the shadow’

‘The trick is never to properly sober up,’ said Turnstile. He opened the cap of the hip flask and took a swig, ‘Sure you won’t have some?’

Something rose within Alex and he returned himself to the cries of the gulls and the miserable realisation that his mathematical solution had neglected to consider the infinite nature of the asymptote.

{[They land on the French coast and make their way to a dock on a river]

that cannot be all.

Turnstile was sketching furiously, ‘Mr Coldstream I would be grateful if you could note as many impressions of the vessel as you can, making use of your engineers eye and your unusual facility for memory.

But this cannot be the thing we have come to see?

And why not, it seems like the sort of remarkable thing that Monsieur Bonaparte would be keen to hide, and which Admiral Collingwood would be keen to know about it.

‘But it is not enough sir. It is a ship driven by steam, I will grant you, and an uncommonly large and well made one. But it is not a craft of war. I am not a naval man Mr Turnstile, but that vessel does not look very capable at all. In fact, it looks designed more to carry freight than marines or cannon. The lack of masts is remarkable is it not? Not simply because there are no sails, but because the main deck is completely flat.’

‘What is your point Mr Coldstream?’

‘She is rather broad, don’t you think, in the beam, with a great flat deck, and winching equipment at each end. This vessel seems to have been designed to carry something of great size.’

‘It may be that whatever the intended cargo was is the true prize here.

Turnstile stopped drawing and studied the vessel carefully, nodding thoughtfully.

Well, Mr Coldstream, perhaps we’ll make a secret agent of you yet.

What sort of a thing is it do you suppose that such a ship could carry?

Almost anything.

‘Those rails sir, along the dockside. Is that a road such as your engines require?’

{[They follow the rails into a cavern in the cliffs]

‘Le petit garcon’

‘L’homme grosse? They must be talking about Bonaparte. They say he’s something of a porker in his dotage. Well, well, so he’s coming here. I think that the Admiral may be interested in that, don’t you? What have we stumbled upon Mr Coldstream? And who is this petit garcon, do you think? Young Lucien perhaps. They say he is simple.’

{[Alex sees the Little Boy gun or at least part of it]

and saw just for a moment the smooth and grimy grain of a well worn musket stock very close to his nose.

Prison and Palace

Alex wakes up in a cell. He is interrogated by a well-spoken, well-dressed Frenchman who clearly has engineering knowledge. {[Cleverly]

I have heard the keyTurn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Alex uses his own knowledge of engineering and his eidetic memory to escape. He also frees Turnstile, who is thrilled that they will be home in time for ‘tea and crumpet’.

Turnstile kills a French fisherman and they steal a boat. They are intercepted by a frigate of the blockade, captained by Captain Wrathbone who Turnstile has cuckolded.

‘He challenged me to a duel.’

‘And did you give him satisfaction?’

‘I think, in fact, his wife was rather more satisfied. Damned unlucky it should be Wrathbone. Here take this.’

Turnstile handed Alex his notebook, and then took a long swig from his hip flask.

‘If he kills me, make sure Collingwood gets that, and anything that you’ve managed to squirrel away in that magic head of yours.’

‘Levez votre bras, s’il vous plait, monsieurs.’

‘English officer and –’ Turnstile looked at Coldstream doubtfully for a moment, ‘ – companion.’

‘Nevertheless, you will levez votre bras, or you will be shot. Comprendez vous monsieurs?’

Alex looked up towards the rail and saw the dew covered snouts of four muskets pointing directly at him and behind them the dew covered snouts and toothless scowls of four grimy marines who looked cold and angry and utterly unconcerned as to whether he lived or died. A boat hook swung down towards them, missing its mark and splashing into the dark water. The hook swung again and struck Alex on the shoulder, knocking him from his seat. A third swing hooked them fast and drew them towards the wooden walls of the warship. As their tiny boat bumped alongside, Alex saw a tricorned head appear above the rail above them, little more than a silhouette against the swirling white mist that surrounded them.

‘Well, well, well, what have we here? Why, as I live and breathe, if it isn’t Mr Turnstile! What an honour you do us sir, visiting us as we ply our humble trade, keeping the shores of England safe for whores and cuckolds. Mister Crimes, perhaps you would help Mr Turnstile aboard?’

A rope ladder unrolled towards them down the greasy, black walls of the ship. Turnstile stood and shrugged at Alex, then began to climb the ladder.

‘Captain Wrathbone,’ called Turnstile as he climbed, ‘I feel it would be quite impolite of me not to inform you that my associate, Mr Coldstream, and I are on a very particular commission that was given to us by Admiral Collingwood himself. Indeed, our return is somewhat overdue and even now we are expected at the admiralty.’

‘Really, Mr Turnstile, well then perhaps we can speed you on your way.’

Alex watched as two burly marines reached over the rail and dragged Turnstile upwards and out of sight. There was the sound of muffled blows. Alex saw the dark shape of a head appear over the rail coughing and spluttering. A pair of bloody teeth fell into the boat at Alex’s feet. The head disappeared from the rail and then the sound of more blows came down to him through the mist.

Alex heard Captain Wrathbone speaking again, ‘You must forgive my men Mr Turnstile. They were certain that we had captured a French spy attempting to enter the country. When one is so eager for the fight it is difficult to contain one’s enthusiasm, don’t you find?’

‘Oh yeth, abtholutely. I quite underthtand. Perhaps the Admiral –’

Another blow silenced Turnstile.

‘Perhaps your associate would care to join us Mr Turnstile? Any friend of yours is certain to be a friend of mine.’

##Unreal City

Isobel in London

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

The Sailor Home From Sea

To his surprise, Alex had grown to have a certain regard for Captain Wrathbone.

He staggered to the rail and rubbed his weary eyes and stubbled chin. The Pool of London opened before them as the Unspeakable slipped silently through the morning mist. The strange, heavy water of the Thames curled into a rainbow sheened bow wave grimy and greasy as if the river was sweating out the tar that befouled it. They had come in on the last of the tide and it seemed to Alex that he could see the slackening of the water as the ponderous red sailed barges wallowed around them.

[Alex has a furious interview with Turvey and Collingwood. He tells them what he saw and heard about le petit garcon]

‘Now then, this other engine you mentioned, you would call it a gun Mr Coldstream?’

‘I believe that it was a gun, although the word does not serve to adequately describe this monstrosity.’

‘Come, come, Mr Coldstream, the Royal Navy has faced many a gun in its time, I hardly think we need shake like a shooting dog at the prospect of a new type.’

‘Sir, you have not understood me. The plans I saw indicated that the barrel of this weapon is to have a length of almost fifty metres as the French would have it.’

Turvey looked blankly at him, ‘Is that large Mr Coldstream?’

‘It is more than one hundred and fifty feet. The internal diameter of the barrel was shown as one meter, that is over a yard, sir.’

Admiral Cochrane replaced his cup on its saucer rather too firmly. Turvey glowered at Alex, ‘If it weren’t for the fact that Turnstile has corroborated parts of your tale, I should hang you for a fool.’

‘Then I am glad that he has seen fit to do so, sir.’

‘Lieutenant, have you had chance to study the plans that Mr Coldstream has reproduced for us.’

‘I have sir.’

‘And what is your opinion of the device they describe.’

‘It could not be built sir.’

‘But if it could. What characteristics would it have as an artillery piece?’

‘That would all depend, sir.’

‘Depend on what?

‘Well, assuming the weapon is built as described, with a shell of a yard or more in diameter, one could expect, it -‘the lieutenant’s face broke out in a smile and he shook his head, ‘forgive me sir, the whole thing is ludicrous, when one considers the explosive impulse of a shell of such a size. These are dreams, sir. Nothing more.’

‘How so, sir?’ thundered Turvey, wiping the smile from the lieutenant’s face.

‘These plans call for steel, sir. Steel.’

Turvey glowered. Alex realised that this was the expression that the admiral chose when he was confused.

Lieutenant Richardson seemed a little exasperated to find himself still talking about a subject he had already explained was a fantasy.

‘Steel is manufactured by the grain, sir. Not by the ounce and certainly not by the kilogram or the blasted metric tonne. Excuse my French.’

There was silence while the information sought permission to board the admiral’s understanding.

‘And what is your opinion, Mr Coldstream?’ asked Collingwood at length.

‘I have no opinion, sir. I have simply reproduced the plans as I saw them. I would add that Mr Turnstile and I saw a very large item of worked metal that was almost certainly this piece that is used to block the breech of the gun’, he said, tapping the plans, ‘It was not made of iron. If I were to venture anything speculative on the matter I would suggest that perhaps the French know something that we do not about the manufacture of steel. When one considers how far our own knowledge of metallurgy has come in this last twenty years, it does not seem so remarkable to me to think that there are processes by which one could make and work steel in such quantities.’

‘Lieutenant Richardson, would you humour an old man and describe the effects of this weapon for us?’

‘Of course sir, I did not mean, that is to say -‘

Collingwood waved him on impatiently. The Lieutenant cleared his throat and began again.

‘A shell one yard in diameter would likely have an explosive charge of {[400] pounds of powder, assuming of course that they {are{ using powder,’ he shot a dark look at Alex and continued, ‘and assuming that the strength of worked steel at this scale is capable of containing the blast, we might expect a shell with a weight not exceeding perhaps one hundred pounds and which would have a muzzle velocity of over four hundred miles per hour. With an optimal trajectory, the shell might ascend to an altitude of over two thousand feet and I would estimate that the range to target could be anywhere from fifty to seventy miles.’

There was silence again. Turvey glowered. Cochrane and Collingwood exchanged looks.

‘Seventy miles?’

‘Yes. In principle.’

Collingwood rose from his seat and walked to the window, nodding to himself as he did so. He looked out towards the observatory.

‘So, it is capable of throwing a shell from the French coast into the heart of London. Can you imagine gentlemen?’

‘What would the explosion of such a shell be like Gray?’ asked Cochrane loafing backwards in his chair and stirring what was left of his tea with a speculative air.

‘It is difficult to say. One would imagine that the shell casing itself would need to be strong to survive the initial firing, and even if one assumes it to be made of steel, it would still be a sizable proportion of the total weight. We could reckon perhaps seventy pounds of powder per shell.’

‘It would make a great mess of a ship. What would the effect be on a city?’

‘It would level any building it hit and perhaps those adjacent to it.’ said Gray.

‘Hmph. He has one gun only. He would destroy our city one street at a time? Then it will take him a while sir!’ fumed Turvey ‘A good long while!’

‘Indeed, though it need not be an explosive shell for all that. Imagine if it were packed with material suitable for raising a fire.’ said Cochrane.

There was silence as his grim pondering was considered.

‘Imagine a great series of fires breaking out at the pool of London, or along the dockside. The loss to shipping and to trade. If Bonaparte has perfected this weapon and can bring it to bear against us, how can we fight it?.’

Collingwood turned away from the window and returned to his seat, shaking his head, ‘I think that you do not quite understand the situation gentlemen. Lieutenant, tell us, what would it be like to be present when the shell struck.’

‘I think I have explained, sir, the force is sufficient -‘

Collingwood shook his head again, ‘No, Lieutenant, not the effects in terms of damage to property, tell us what would it be like for an observer. The Londoner - man, woman or child - unfortunate enough to be standing on a street on which this blasphemy fell.’

Gray looked confused, ‘Well, it is difficult to know. I suppose the first thing would be that the shell would arrive at a speed of almost three hundred miles per hour. You would scarcely have heard it before it struck. Then, if you were within a hundred feet or so, the blast would be enough to kill you outright I should say. Beyond that, you might live to tell the tale but the heat and noise of it would be certain to take a great toll on the nerves of those not hardened to such things. It would be as if a magazine had exploded, I suppose we have all seen something of the sort, though usually at a distance.’

Collingwood nodded, ‘At the Nile the Bellerophon went up … we dragged men from the water that had been blown out of their clothes and burned across every inch of their bodies. The lesson, gentlemen, is this. Bonaparte does not need to destroy the whole city, or even any large part of it. The shell would always get through, don’t you see? That is the true horror of it. There is no help for it. And how will the people of London respond I wonder? Do you think we have seen disorder in our cities in recent years? No, I think not. Have we seen panic in a populous of millions? No, we have not.’

Even now people are fleeing. No one can live under such a monstrous threat.

‘Now then gentlemen, are there any further questions for Mr Coldstream?’

Even a mind as gifted as yours could not conceive of a device capable of defending us against it. Our only hope would be to attack and seize the gun itself, and yet … Do you not think that Bonaparte will seek to protect this monstrous thing in a fortress, to ring it around with battalions of men and cannon. Indeed he will. Our spies report fortification work and deep excavation at five different sites along the channel coast.

Five?

Indeed.

Whether he means to build five of these monsters, or simply to keep us guessing at the location of the one is not yet known.

But five … it is almost inconceivable.

I am an engineer sir, not a magician. I work with iron and steam. If these drawings were not so terribly detailed, had not been so revised and amended, I would dismiss them as a work of fantasy.

But?

But these are real drawings sir, and real plans.

A weapon that could strike at London herself. A weapon that could not be silenced. Such a thing cannot be conceived.

I assure you sir that it has been conceived, indeed it is my belief that such a thing is even now being constructed and is intended for use against us.

{[In return for his help,Collingwood tells Alex what he knows about Whirlaway,not much, except that the last clock belonged to Lord Marchpane.]

‘I had thought that perhaps you had had him killed.’

‘I had him killed?’

‘Because I do not trust Lord Bradford. Within the confines of these walls I would go so far as to say that I believe Lord Bradford to be a traitor, or something near enough to get him strung up.’

‘I know that you trusted my master. I know that he trusted you. There is something that he asked me to do. In fact sir, It was the last thing that he asked me to do, and so I am bound to do it.’

‘And you believe that I can help you to carry out your master’s last wish?’

‘Perhaps. I know that you commissioned several pieces from my master.’

‘That is true.’

‘It was Master Whirlaway’s wish that I find certain of his clocks again.’

‘For what purpose, Mr Coldstream.’

‘I do not know, sir. That is, I do not fully understand his reasons, and that which I do understand I cannot tell.’

Collingwood studied Alex’s face carefully, ‘You are honest, Mr Coldstream, at any rate. It is not always a virtue. Which are those pieces that you wish to locate.’

‘In truth, I am not sure sir. It may help if you could provide a list of all of the clocks that my Master made for you.’

Collingwood looked dubious. ‘There is the mantel clock at Grey End. I believe that you presented yourself there to clean it quite recently, so you know of that one, and there is a case clock in my rooms at the admiralty. Those were the only clocks I had him make for my own purposes. There are the marine chronometers. Your master was commissioned to make nineteen of those for various ships of the line, the majority, alas, are now keeping Greenwich time at the bottom of the ocean.’

Alex waited for Collingwood to continue, but he did not.

‘I believe that is everything.’ said the Admiral as the silence became uncomfortable.

‘You are sure, sir?’

Violent red storm clouds immediately rose in Collingwood’s cheeks and the thunder broke across Alex, ‘Your master never charged less than a hundred guineas for one of his damned clocks. It is the sort of purchase that one remembers, sir. Of course I am sure!’

‘I am sorry, your lordship. I did not mean to be impertinent. The matter is of some importance to me.’

Collingwood’s anger subsided a little, ‘Indeed. It is important that a man keep his word. I am sorry I cannot help you further. You have been helpful Mr Coldstream. These are dangerous days, and we can be glad of any help that we can find.’

Alex nodded. ‘Sir, if there is nothing further, then I would take my leave of you.’

Alex headed for the door, his mind clouded with the darkness of a depression. He knew of no more clocks that his master had made. He had failed.

‘There is always the watch of course.’

Alex spun round to find the admiral peering thoughtfully at a chart of the Gambiers.

‘A watch?’

‘Yes. I had not thought to mention it as I did not purchase it from your master and ­- ‘ Collingwood removed his spectacles and placed them on the desk, looking almost furtively, ‘- the matter is really quite shameful.’

‘I lost it.’

‘Where?’

‘That is the shameful part Mr Coldstream, it is not a matter of where, but a matter of who. Tell me, Mr Coldstream, how stands my reputation with the people?’

‘You are respected.’

‘Indeed. An honest man? Incorruptible? Puritanical? Living only to defend this great land of ours from an ever present danger?’

‘Something of that.’

‘Well perhaps there is some truth in it, especially in these dark days, there is little help for it but to commit oneself totally to the task in hand. I was not always so noble minded. Most men have weaknesses Mr Coldstream. Mine was cards.’

‘The Tarreau?’

‘Don’t be a fool man! Playing cards. Gambling. Damn near lost everything I ever won at sea over a game of cards, on more than one occasion.’

‘And who was the man who beat you?’

‘Marchpane. Army type. He was a captain, so was I. Now he’s a general, though God himself knows how. Nasty piece of work. Cruel sort. Impressed a few of Liverpool’s crowd during the last run in. Ruthlessness is good for one’s career it seems. At any rate he won the watch from me. What he has done with it, I cannot say. I believe that he is in the Caribbean at present, though it would surprise me if he still owned the piece. He was an even greater gambler than I.’

‘He had a batman named Chard.’

Alex sets out to find the last piece of the Whirlaway engine. He asks Poynter for help. They hire Chard who served under Marchpane and knows what happened to the final part of the engine. It is not part of a clock, it is part of a watch.

‘I need help, Percy.’

‘What kind of help?’

‘I need to find a man called Chard. A soldier that served with the Newcastle Light Infantry at the time of the March.’

‘The NLI? Well, there is an obvious place to start.’

‘Where?’

‘In the Heart Of The Light of course.’

The Heart Of The Light

‘Sorted.’

When the man spoke, Alex could tell that he was from the North. But it was not his North of empty hills, windswept beaches and ancient stone cities, rather, Alex knew that he was born of one of those red brick shanties that clung to the belching factories, crowding together on the damp clay and stony rubbish of the new born cities, coal blackened cancers that were rootless and without foundations.

‘I do not catch your meaning, sir. The innkeeper told us that you were Chard. Is that so?’

The man was hunched over at a table in the shadow of the corner and draped in a shapeless greatcoat that was almost glossy with a sheen of filth. His hands rested together, as if in prayer, on the rim of a tankard. When Percy spoke, two green eyes rolled upwards in watery sockets behind lank tentacles of greasy hair and a face that was pocked and riven with scars was lifted towards them.

‘You have sorted me out, as wheat from chaff. I am Chard.’

He drained the tankard then set the empty vessel down and began to regard them with a gaze that Alex found immediately unnerving. It was like that of a baby, Alex suddenneither judging nor moved but simply \emph{looking.

‘Perhaps you would like another drink, Mr Chard?’ said Percy presently.

‘That is a sound plan, sir. Sound.’ Three tankards were delivered to the table. Chard picked his up immediately and began to drink. Alex looked at Percy. Percy shrugged.

‘Mr Chard, I would like to ask you some questions,’ said Alex, who had struggled in vain as always to bring to mind a suitable pretext for the conversation he wished to have.

Chard nodded. Alex began to feel uncomfortable, as if he were applying pressure to a stuck lever or gear train which might suddenly give and unbalance him.

‘It is about your military service, that is to say the war.’

‘It was not my fault, sir,’ Chard said levelly.

‘What was not your fault?’ said Alex, surprised.

‘The war. It was already ongoing when I found myself in France.’

Alex stared at him in confusion, then looked at Percy who was chuckling into his pint, and then back to Chard. Alex came to the sudden realisation that somewhere very far away behind the pondwater green of the man’s eyes and the damaged impassive bark of his face, Chard was laughing at him.

‘Quite. I had not meant to suggest that it was you who had started the war. I wished to ask you about those you served with. In particular about Lord Marchpane.’

Chard glanced at Alex. A movement that was very much quicker than any he had so far demonstrated to them. Then he drank and was silent for a good long while.

‘You wear a soldier’s coat, but you are not a soldier,’ said Chard.

‘No sir, I am not. I do not pretend to be.’

‘It is as well that you do not.’

‘The coat belonged to my brother.’

‘And he has no further need of it?’

‘He has not.’

Chard nodded thoughtfully, ‘But he did not leave it in France sir, as so many of his comrades did.’

Alex shook his head, ‘No the coat returned with my brother in it, but something of him remained in France. Whatever it was it seemed that he could not live without it. The coat is all I have left of him.’

Chard nodded again and drank deeply.

‘I will not offer you my sympathy sir for you have no need of it and I have none to give,’ Chard drank again and fixed Alex with a gaze as real as a bayonet, ‘But I understand.’

‘I was no more than a boy sir when they brought me the drum. They had taken it from the hands of the lad who went before me, name of Billy Clapham. Still had blood on it. There was only one drumstick. The other must have been trampled underfoot, just like the boy.’

‘A stick in the mud,’ said Percy to himself. Alex looked at him in horror but found the poet staring into space in the way he did sometimes when composing. He knew that Percy was moved by the story in his own way, seeing some deeper meaning in it than Alex could. To his relief it seemed that Chard had not heard him at all.

‘One stick is no good sirs, no good at all for war drumming. If one is to drive men to their deaths then what is needed is a proper rattle.’

‘“Use your initiative lad,” was what my sergeant said to me. So I made new sticks. A pair, whittled from a bit of old tent pole snatched from a fire. You have to make a pair see, to get the balance right. Carve them in one piece and then split them down the middle.’ Chard made a cutting motion with his hand. ‘And then I learned to drum sirs. A lad from another company showed me how and I worked harder at that than anything else I had done before. Hour after hour with the sticks all bound up with rags to keep them quiet like.’

He drummed out a quiet tattoo on the table’s edge with the index fingers of each hand. For all the sound was soft and slow, Alex felt the chill wind of the battlefield passing across the back of his neck. He shivered.

‘But then there was the matter of the other stick.’

‘The \emph{other stick?’ asked Alex.

‘Billy Clapham’s stick. I kept it see. Couldn’t throw it away. It was all that was left of him. I carried it around in my pack for months and after a while I began to fancy that it was speaking to me.’

Poynter’s eyes had drifted upwards to the ceiling and gently closed. Now they snapped open and he sprang forward, leaning in towards Chard, ‘It \emph{spoke to you?’

Chard drank and nodded slowly, ‘After a fashion. Not words as such, not really. Or if there were words they were only those as I had put there myself. But the very fact that it was there in my pack, soaked in the blood of Billy Clapham, well, after a while it began to play on my mind sir, in a manner of speaking. Before long that was all I could think on, and that was when I started to think what it was the stick was trying to tell me. When it spoke as it were.’

‘And what did it say?’ asked Poynter, causing Alex to writhe in discomfort at what he assumed was a sarcastic comment, but then blink in surprise when he realised that it was not, and that Poynter was leaning forward and waiting for Chard’s next utterance with a genuine wide-eyed eagerness that it seemed to him he had not seen since Percy had been a boy pestering travellers at the coaching inn near their home for news of the wide world.

‘It wanted to be played sir, was all. It took me a long time to think on it, but that was all in the end. It seemed right somehow. Like a part of Billy Clapham was still playing. Like not all of him had died in that fucking French field.’

‘And so you played the drum with it again?’ asked Poynter.

‘I did sir. But at the same time, I couldn’t just throw out one of my own sticks. I was too used to them by that time. The drum was a part of me. So I played with three sticks. At first I just held Billy’s stick alongside one of my own, in my right hand like this,’ he showed them the shape of his weathered hand, ‘but after a while, I got to trying other things. Both sticks working separately but together, if you see my meaning.’

He began to drum on the table again, but this time used two fingers from his right hand, a quicker rhythm that rose and fell in tempo and timbre that made Alex feel sad.

‘They called me The Man With Three Staves.’

‘From the tarreau card?’ asked Percy.

Alex stared in wonder and then drank a long draught.

‘We craved the battle. We were mad for it.’

‘You wear a soldier’s coat, but you are not a soldier’

‘No sir, I am not. I do not pretend to be.’

‘It is as well that you do not.’

‘The coat belonged to my brother.’

‘And he has no further need of it?’

‘He has not.’

Chard nodded thoughtfully, ‘But he did not leave it in France sir, as so many of his comrades did.’

Alex shook his head, ‘No the coat returned with my brother in it, but something of him remained in France. Whatever it was it seemed that he could not live without it. The coat is all I have left of him.’

Chard nodded again and drank deeply.

‘I will not offer you my sympathy sir for you have no need of it and I have none to give,’ Chard drank again and fixed Alex with a gaze as real as a bayonet, ‘But I understand.’

‘I would write home. None of my family could read. Does that seem foolish? I wrote for hope. For comfort. For luck.’

‘She was a constant thing. Constant. Do you understand me sir? She would always be there, always carry on, unroken by the world. Like a river, no, better, a waterfall.’

{[Peterloo]

‘With the rest of the women and girls from her factory and all of the other factories. They say there were a hundred thousand of them gathered there that day. I wish only that I had been there to see it. Four hundred of those gathered did not return home that night. Elizabeth was one of them.’

‘They call it Peterloo,as if to make some great battle of it. But it was no battle. No battle at all. At Waterloo there were no women run down by horses, no girls run through with cavalry sabres, no unarmed mill hands blasted with muskets. Not by the Frenchies, not by the Prussians and damn well not by us. Cowardly bastards.’

‘I found him sir. Later. We had been sent to Ireland in Twenty One. There was talk of Bony landing there and stirring up trouble with the bogtrotters. Insurrection, that sort of thing. The {[gdsgg] cavalry were there with us.

‘I found him sir. Found the tent where he slept and I went there one night and I slit his throat.’

Alex looked at the red rims of Chard’s eyes and all at once realised just how dangerous a man was sitting across from him.

‘The army offer men gold sir, but it is fool’s gold.’

‘The man is made of stone.’

‘That was the way of it. Say what you like about Bony. Men call him mad. Call him wicked. Call him greedy, call him short. But no one ever calls him stupid do they? There are reasons for that, sir. He didn’t spend all of his time coming back from Moscow thinking about how cold his toes were, or where he could get a hot croissant, now did he?’

The old soldier thrust his face towards Alex seeking affirmation.

‘I really couldn’t say.’

‘No, he did not. He spent his time thinking on how he’d been beaten, and how, when it come down to it, what the Russians had done to him was sound strategy sir. Sound.’

‘Lovely language, Russian,’ Poynter said dreamily.

‘And that’s what he did to us as you well know sirs.’

Alex set his face in a look of polite interest as if to suggest to Chard that further elaboration would be welcome, but Chard needed no encouragement.

‘In Sixteen, when Welly had got over his pox we all set out campaigning again. Champing at the bit we was, men and officers both, This time we’ll finish him off for sure lads. So off we goes haring around France trying to hold him to a proper ding-dong, but Bony just keeps falling back and falling back. Our wagon train getting longer, his getting shorter. His men melting away into the villages and the farms, us picking up all sorts of riff-raff and camp followers. But it’s just a matter of time, that’s what Welly says ‘Just a matter of time men, we’ll have him before the summer is out!’ But of course, that was the thing. That was the thing!’Chard chuckled craftily and took a long draught from his tankard.

Then he sat perfectly still and stared into space.

‘Excuse me, um, Mr Chard, you were saying?’ said Poynter after a minute had passed and Chard had shown no signs of returning from his reverie.

‘Saying what now?’

‘You said ‘That was the thing.’ you seemed quite sure on this point.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes. You said that the Duke had promised you would have Bonaparte before the summer was out and, unless I have mistaken your meaning, \emph{that was the thing.’

Chard chuckled, ‘Indeed it was sir, indeed it was.’

‘But why?’

‘Because there wasn’t no summer. Not that year, nor the next. Not so as you’d notice any how. June and July we tramped up and down roads no better than rivers, every man and horse head to toe in mud. Mud in your eyes, mud in your rifle, mud in your mouth. There was gales went on for days and hailstones bigger than fists smashing down all over. Week after week of slogging around, never drying out, never resting and come August everyone starts to get a bit itchy.’

‘Some sort of canker or rot?’ volunteered Poynter.

‘Not that kind of itchy. We’re marching up and down all over, see? All over the whole country and every field we march past is empty. All the soil’s smashed up by the rain and every stalk of corn is broken over by the wind and the hail and it don’t take a farmer to tell you there’s going to be no kind of harvest this year. When the harvest fails its hard on the folks what live on the land, but they make a go of it. There’s always a little put by, a bit more work put into stretching things a little further and all them things that you can eat but don’t if you don’t have to.’

‘Like Mrs Appletree’s Special Pies.’

Alex glowered at Poynter.

‘That’s all fine well, if you’re a farmer not got his harvest in, but if you’re an army of fifty thousand men and the same again hanging on whoring and thieving, well sir, then you’re in a mess. A proper mess. The news from England’s no better. They’ve got nothing to spare and even if they did we’re hundreds of muddy miles from the ports. What’s to be done?’

‘The March,’ said Alex quietly as if understanding something for the first time.

‘The March is what they called it after. When they painted all those fine paintings and wrote all those fine poems.’

‘Bastard, bastard Shelley, damn his eyes,’ muttered Poynter.

‘But it wasn’t a march sir, it was a bloody shambles. That’s a strange thing sir, a very strange thing indeed.’

‘What is, Mr Chard?’

‘One day we’re an army, marching forward, rank and file. Hungry and tired and missing home, but orderly. Soldierly. The next day, there’s nothing but a mob trampling each other into the mud. Nothing had changed. Nothing had changed sir except one thing.’

‘And what was that, Mr Chard?’

‘We weren’t going forward. Soon as we knew we was going for home, that was it. We’d been doing five miles a day in the last bit of the advance. Soon as we turned around it was ten and fifteen and more. Each company competing with the next to see who could get on the furthest. We knew there was nothing left. Nothing back there the way we’d come. If you weren’t at the head of the column you starved, and even if were there was no guarantees. There’s some terrible sights to be seen in the world sirs. Terrible sights.’

Chard drank again and the silence weighed heavily upon them.

‘It wasn’t any kind of picture that could be painted nor poem that could be written neither. I saw things in those weeks that I can’t think on, nor less speak of. I saw men eating the leaves from the trees. I saw men eating their belts and their bootstraps. I have seen men fight and kill for a handful of acorns. I have seen …’ his voice broke and trembled and it seemed for a moment as if he would lose control of himself entirely, but then thought better of it and said quietly ‘I have seen terrible sights, sirs. Terrible sights.’

Chard drank once more.

‘And all the time there was Bony and his boys nipping at our heels. Not an army, just skirmishers, only a few companies moving fast alongside us through the woods and hedgerows. Getting food from the peasants what have hidden it from us, scouting out the road ahead, setting up ambushes, picking off the slow and the weak, grinding us down. Crossing them rivers was the worst. The bloody Somme and the bloody Marne. Slows everyone down the river crossings see. Everyone slipping and sliding in the mud, horses and gun carriages all fouled up, officers with no fight in ‘em trying to draw up squares.

‘That’s when Bony showed up.’

‘All that was left of us all stumbling and crowding our way down onto blasted Dunkerque Strand and nothing there but sand and gulls. Many was the man that just kept on. Wading out into the waves till Neptune took him. When the tide turned there was a dark line of ‘em all along the beach there all tangled up with weeds and old nets. Terrible things, the gulls sir. They start off scared. But soon as they realise that you aren’t to be scared of no more, well …

‘And every hour more of us turning up on the beach there. Just waiting to die. The sky was a terrible colour that day sir. It had stopped raining for a spell, but that was no mercy for there was no water on that beach that could be drunk. And the sky looked like bruises sir. The clouds all dark and low and moving fast across us. The gulls got swept this way and that above us. When a squall caught them. The wind that is. When the wind took a gull unawares like. They dropped whatever it was they had in their beaks sirs. There’s no other way to say it.’

‘Not a sail to be seen out on the sea. And that was all grey and green and chopped up like a field at plough time. All there was for us was to look out onto the water, at the purple horizon, looking for the sails sir. But there was none.’

‘Course, we didn’t know what was happening in London. But the political men had called us dead already. Said we had to save the fleet to stop Bony pushing on into the Ocean. Liverpool and all those other bastards looking at columns of numbers were there were men dying in the foam on Dunkerque Strand. But then Harrison and his men made it back from Calais, sailed all the way up the Thames. They carried him to the admiralty in a sedan chair. He was screaming and raving at them, lost a leg the day before but sailed some leaky riverboat across the channel and up the Thames. Dumped him on the marble of the Admiralty, all mud and blood, pointing a pistol at anyone who came near, screaming for Collingwood. And Collingwood came. And he made ‘em put Harrison in his office and sent ‘em all out.’

‘Some say it was two minutes and some say three, and none knows what Harrison said because he died that afternoon, but after no more than three minutes Collingwood stormed out of the admiralty, went straight down to the Pool of London, took charge of every ship there, including the foreign ones and set sail right there and then. I will tell you this for no charge sirs, they can build his column as high as they like. I would shift the stones myself. I have never seen anything quite as wonderful in this world as the sails of Collingwood’s Armada and the long boats coming out to meet us. He brought them right in, I mean right in, ran four of the bastards aground, all guns blazing, the cannons going over our heads and holding Bony off long enough to get us off that blasted beach.’

‘I’ve fought in Sorento, Quebec, Hautefort, Moscow, Lisbon, Madrid, Gibraltar and all the rest.’

‘Moscow?’

‘Yes. I was there in the last lot. A bad bloody business. The worst yet.

‘A watch? He was an infantry captain, of course he had a watch.’

The Signalman

‘You asked me about clocks, sir. I do not undertake to divulge military secrets for no purpose. The ciphering engine is a closely held secret and no business of yours.’ Alex visits the semaphore tower and discovers the final element of the whirlaway engine.

There was a thunderous clattering above him and for a moment Alex though that the machinery had failed somehow and was crashing towards him. Then he realised that it had simply begun operation and was now thrashing and thumping like a steam-powered loom.

‘The engine means we can send fifty letters a minute,’ Dawes bawled into his ear, though Alex barely heard him above the din, ‘That is twice as fast as a man can do it, and of course the rate can be sustained for as long as is necesary. The real benefit is in the cipherment, as of course you are aware sir.’

‘Of course.’

Alex gazed in wonder at the engine. His eyes followed the taut wires that led from the clockwork upwards into the body of the semaphore mechanism. He found something compelling about the marriage of his master’s engine and the heavy machinery of the semaphore. He reached out to touch a cable where it still vibrated after the last burst of activity.

‘Careful sir, do not touch the line, it can get hot.’

‘A hot line to Paris. Is it used often?’

‘Not for the intended purpose, not very often sir. I think the Admiral prefers the old methods by and large.’

Dawes led the way into a little room that had a tiny casement window with a view of the observatory. He shut the felt-lined door and Alex found his ears suddenly ringing in the relative quiet of what he could now see was Dawes’ office. There was a narrow bookcase filled with ledgers, a desk with a worn leather top and a tiny grate that stood empty and cold.

‘You see that little expense is spared on us poor operatives sir, but a Signal Man needs very little.’

‘You say that the line is rarely used. How can you know that it will work? That the French are waiting for your messages whenever you wish to send them?’

‘Well sir, there are the tests of course.’

‘You \emph{test the semaphore? But how?’

‘Nothing could be easier sir. Each week the Froggies send us a sealed message by diplomatic bag and each week they send a signal by semaphore and we open up the message and hope they match. We do the same for them. Keeps everyone on their toes. Don’t know when the message is coming in see, or if it’s real until we open up the sealed one.’

‘And what do they send?’

‘Very dull sir - mostly. Weather reports and lists of historical events all in terms of their ungodly calendar.’

‘And what do you send?’

‘Ah well now, we get a bit more creative see. I sent ‘em my Sally’s recipe for hotpot once. These days it’s mostly poetry.’

‘Poetry?’

‘Oh yes, but what I do is I mix it up see. Got to send them something they couldn’t already have. So I likes to take one line from one poem, one line from another. Change the words around, that sort of thing.’

‘Now then. The Admiral’s message says you have come to make an adjustment to the ciphering engine.’

‘Yes, I believe that it shall not take long.’

A parallel piece of the engine, complete in its own way slipped away into his hands.

‘He is mixing up the poetry? Good God Alex, it is no wonder we have gone to the dogs!’

‘Sounds like the monster Shelley’s bitch of a wife dreamed up. All pieces fastened together. No harmony. No whole.’

##The Human Engine

‘Who would have thought that a machine could move itself faster than a horse can run? Would your grandfather have believed that do you think?’

‘And if a machine can move, can act, can take part in the world, well then Mr Coldstream, why could not a machine write poetry, or dream?’

‘What dreams would they dream?’

London Under The Gun

‘I believe I have quite learned to stop worrying about it all. I have come to love the gun.’

‘Have you heard about ‘Duck and Cover’? It’s terribly naughty, but simply everyone is doing it. Poll said that she hadn’t had quite so many gentlemen under her petticoats since the coronation.’

‘They say he has only managed to build one. Apparently he has lost his engineer. It is most dreadfully careless of him. Mr Coldstream, you are an engineer, have you ever found yourself to be lost?’

‘Sometimes I think that perhaps we are all a little lost.’

‘The king has gone to Weedon they say.’

‘Really? I had not thought him a coward.’

‘It is not his own wish I think. There is a Plan. It seems that it is most important to ensure the continuance of our little island and its government in the person of the king.’

‘Yes, and in the persons of the government as well no doubt. Tell me, does Liverpool sleep in the city or does he retire to a safe distance at night after urging us all to greater courage?’

‘To protect our kingdom and to survive this fearful gun, these are our noble aims.’

‘And why do we not strike at this fearful thing? They say the navy sails peacefully up and down before Plymouth Hoe. Where is the army that has cost us so very much these past years.’

‘They have called up the volunteers.’

‘Oh well, we shall all be quite safe then

‘Every woman in this city fears she may die at any moment. Do you know what women think of when they think of their own deaths Coldstream?’

‘I suppose that nothing I could do would prevent you from enlightening me.’

‘They think of that for which nature intended them. And when their minds turn in such a direction, they naturally think of Mr Turnstile. It is harvest time Mr Coldstream. A man might stride through this city like a reaper, mowing down whichever shapely stalk of corn he chooses. God bless Monsieur Bonaparte say I! Let him build more guns. In fact, we should help him!’

‘I have heard it suggested that certain of our engineers have already made endeavours along those lines.’

Turnstile turned to Alex and spoke in a manner that was suddenly measured and calm, ‘Those are reckless words Mr Coldstream, and ones you would do well not to repeat in the hearing of others.’

The Dog Far Hence

Brunel? Oh no, Brunel is quite mad, I assure you.’

‘Master Whirlaway once told me of a time ­- ‘, Alex stopped and then smiled to himself, pleased that he at last understood something that had long puzzled him, ‘ - of \emph{the time. The time in which he built this. He was young, very young and just begun on his clocks. He said that one morning he woke and it was as if quicksilver flowed in his mind. One idea following from the next. He built a great tower of them, each more fantastic than the last. He did not tell me of the engine, only that he had spent a period of some months in a kind of trance where everything had seemed simple, where each step forward had been easy and assured. I had thought that he had built clocks, but now I know that the engine was the fruit of that time. I think he thought that if he told me of his annus mirabilis it might inspire me to have a similar experience. Alas, the quicksilver has eluded me. Forgive me, I must seem foolish.’

Isobel shook her head, ‘Indeed not. Quite the contrary. I understand that of which your master spoke. There was a time when quicksilver ran in my mind too.’

Alex stopped working and looked at her with a smile, ‘Really? And what was the fruit of your labours? Not a Whirlaway Engine?’

‘No. It was something terrible.’

‘Perhaps then, that is to say, did you, \emph{were you, rather, I mean -‘ he looked up at her face and found the soft harmony of curves there to be so beautiful that he felt for a moment as if he were looking through the world into the realm of forms.

‘Was I afraid? I have been afraid my whole life. Sometimes I think that all of us are afraid, all of the time. I see much in the world that would confirm it.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Alex considering her hypothesis, ‘though I think that there was a time when I was not afraid.’

‘When was that?’

‘When I was a child. Before Dougal went to war. Before I was apprenticed to Whirlaway. Perhaps it was because I was ignorant of the world, but I do not remember that I lived in fear.’

‘A child? Eight or nine? Before Waterloo. Were you not scared of invasion then, of Bonaparte at your door?’

Alex smiled as he remembered, ‘Oh yes. Terribly afraid, but only as much as we were scared of ghosts and strange beasts upon the hills. He was a fire side tale, not real to us, though there had been so much war even then.’

‘And what was real to you?’

‘I kept a stickleback in a jar. In summer the bracken would grow taller than we were and if you walked within it on a hot day the richness of its scent was intoxicating. In winter, on a still night, we would walk across the snow into the fields and lie on our backs looking up at the clear stars that shone without twinkling and the silence deafened us. Now, even after everything, these things seem more real to me than almost anything else.’

‘I have been scared. I have run. I have hidden. I have done whatever I have had to do to survive. This has been my life. I cannot pretend to be other than I am.’

‘And what are you?’

‘I do not know any more.’

He reached out and took her hand, felt the tension in her as she made to move away, and then the control being exercised as she did not.

‘I remember that you collected hyacinths in Killarnock’s garden one day when it was raining. That is how I have always remembered you. The hyacinth girl.’

‘What is it?’

‘An engine. A quite marvellous engine.’

‘It looks more like a clock.’

‘It is no clock.’

‘But what does it do?’

‘I believe that it is a thinking engine.’

‘Thinking? But how?’

‘I believe that it can think those thoughts that it is told to think. It can think them through to their ends.’

‘But how. I do not understand. How can one tell a machine to think?’

Alex’s eyes sparkled as he spoke, ‘I think that as yet I can see but a shadow of the whole, but even that is marvellous. The machine is only a piece of his achievement, don’t you see? He has invented a language for thought. One so precise it may be written in the teeth of wheels. So elegant. So intelligent.’

‘And the engine can hear this thought language?’

Alex laughed out loud and hugged himself as the realisation came to him, ‘Oh! So much more, don’t you see? It can hear it and {speak{ it. It can {think{ about that which you tell it and respond.’

She watched the wheels as they span and chattered back and forth, ‘And what is it thinking?’

Alex stood, staring at the device, savouring the moment before he acknowledged to himself that which he knew to be true. A smile spread slowly from ear to ear, his head bobbed slowly, and then faster as he breathed the words aloud.

‘It is Whirlaway.’

The Roots That Clutch

She had watched the thing in curious silence for several minutes as Alex paced backwards and forwards muttering to himself in excitement, periodically pulling at his hair or slapping his head, or letting out great exclamatory laughs as he tried to explore the wonder of it within his own mind.

It was a very strange sort of engine. Unlike any clockwork device or steam engine that she had ever seen, there seemed to be no pattern to its noise or motion. It chattered and clicked and whirred, sometimes pausing for a second or more before continuing upon its way. Isobel fancied that the babbling of the machine might be taken for a conversation one could not quite overhear. When she watched it undertaking such seemingly purposeful and complex work, the idea that it might be thinking was not so very strange to her.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Why what?’

‘Why did he make it?’

‘Because he could.’

‘That is no answer. Still, I have a better question, why did he unmake it?’

Alex turned as if to answer and then found himself without words, staring at her. It was almost as if he could glimpse her thoughts flashing ahead of him like a shoal of silvered fish. Always faster, always greater in number than his own. It was as if he was in the presence of his master again, racing like the tortoise against the hare. But a thought came to him, unlooked for and alive in his mind. Alex recognised that it was one of those ideas he should not think through too deeply, but simply trust. He smiled at the thought of the surprise those shimmering fish would take as it came crashing into their ocean.

‘Let us ask him.’

‘Who?’

‘Master Whirlaway. The engine is a rendering of his own mind in clockwork. Perhaps it is only a crude facsimile, but nonetheless, it is he.’

‘And how will you ask him?’

‘He taught me a language of clocks.’

The engine soughed and snuffled gently like a contented horse. The wheel span almost silently. Isobel sensed the weight of it all the more now that it was in motion. She suddenly had a terrible vision of the thing breaking free from its bearings, crashing across the floor of the engine house and through the wall, on across the fields and through the villages crushing everything before it and never ceasing. She shivered.

‘Wonderful isn’t it?’

She started and then cursed herself silently. ‘On the contrary, I think it is quite awful, Mr Stevenson,’ she said and took one step to her right in order to remove her shoulder from beneath his chin.

‘Oh indeed it is, Miss Prentiss, indeed it is. An awful, majestic thing.’ He drew alongside her again, leaning against the railing that surrounded the engine, smoothing the greasy lock of hair that was forever wayward across his forehead.

‘Perhaps you would like to touch it?’

‘No, Mr Stevenson, I do not think that I should like that at all.’

‘But Miss Prentiss, until you have felt the warmth of an engine, you cannot fathom what a living force there is within. It is quite safe. Here, allow me.’

He took her by the wrist and drew the grey kid glove from her fingers. She watched in horror, quite unable to think of a response.

‘There is nothing to fear Miss Prentiss, the boiler housing is lined with mahogany and cork. What you will sense is just the merest impression of the inferno within.’

She allowed him to press her hand to the green painted belly of the engine, felt the dull warmth beneath her fingers and, apart from her own revulsion at the proximity of the great engineer, found herself quite unmoved.

‘Yes, that is remarkable Mr Stevenson,’ she said and snatched the glove back from him. She turned as if to head for the door of the engine house, but Stevenson pirouetted around her, coming to rest against the railings again between her and the doorway.

‘see how the piston moves? Ceaselessly in and out. It never grows tired. It never gets stuck. The cylinder lubricates it you see? In and out. In. And out.’

A Game Of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass

Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines

From which a golden Cupidon peeped out

(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)

Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra

Reflecting light upon the table as

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,

From satin cases poured in rich profusion.

In vials of ivory and coloured glass

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

Unguent, powdered, or liquid - troubled, confused

And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air

That freshened from the window, these ascended

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,

Flung their smoke into the laquearia,

Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.

Huge sea-wood fed with copper

Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,

In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?’barked Beatrice.

hypocrite ingenieur!

‘Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!’

‘Les ponts des Londres, tombee la, tombee la, tombee la,

les ponts des Londres, tombee la, ma dame joli’

‘Is that not what the children sing?’

‘Ah, non, non, non, Mr Coldstream you are mistaken. You have been listening only to the playful cries of my little boy. Le petit garcon is only a prototype.’

Beatrice laughed and swept before them, throwing open the double doors and streaming into the room beyond in a flourish of ragged silks and satins. Alex looked through the doorway at what lay within.

‘Oh God.’

‘Is it not wonderful, Mr Coldstream?’ asked Beatrice, throwing her arms around the thing as if hugging it, though Alex saw that her arms stretched less than half the way around. Her face was grotesquely stretched in the reflections of its polished surface.

He entered the room as if in a trance, unable to tear his eyes from its centrepiece. He walked slowly across the black and white tiles watching his own comically thin reflection in the cylindrical surface. He was a thin man, standing before what he now realised was the fat man, l’homme gros, or at least a part of it.

‘Of course I have made this one pretty for my palace. The ones I have made for London will not be so lovely.’

Alex reached out and touched the thing, feeling it strangely warm beneath his fingertips, with an almost imperceptible sheen of grease that made it seem like he was touching skin. He stood before a polished cylinder that was taller than he was and half as much again. Above him the walls of the cylinder tapered to a point in a graceful parabola. He knew it for what it was, absurd, grotesque, blasphemous and obscene.

A shell for the gun not yet fired. The gun called Fat Man.

Somewhere in his mind, a thousand questions formed themselves, but he could say nothing.

‘They tell me that it will travel to the very edge of the air itself. Twenty five kilometres high. Can you imagine? When it strikes London it will be travelling at a velocity of six hundred kilometres per hour. Tremblant has calculated that it will not be heard arriving until several seconds after it has struck. Do you think that Admiral Collingwood can answer the challenge of my Fat Man, Mr Coldstream? We shall play a game of chess, the admiral and I.’

‘And where will your rails take you I wonder Mr Coldstream?’

‘Where?’ He turned and fixed her with an odd look. Then he laughed, ‘I had not thought as to where. To the future I suppose.’

‘And what will we find there at the end of your gleaming rails?’

‘I do not know.’

‘And yet you bend all your efforts towards getting there as quickly as possible.’

‘I wish to know what is there.’

‘What if there is nothing there for any of us? Only steam and engines and noise and soot?’

‘still, I would wish to know.’

‘You are like a moth drawn to a flame Mr Coldstream. You would go there even if it destroyed you?’

‘I would.’

‘But you’ve seen her! Good god, she is quite mad. She would reign over a new Terror. Another generation born into blood and misery. It cannot be. It must not be.’

‘Then they are betrayed.’

‘How so?’

‘The first wave of the invasion will strike at the navy in its home harbours. The plan depends upon surprise. The fleet will be damaged, if not destroyed, and all the while the army itself is safe in transports, not yet set sail from England.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘They will land on the beaches, and they will occupy the towns, but it will be the beaches and towns of England, don’t you see? Once word has come that the navy is defeated, then Bradford can move against Collingwood. He has Marchpane and he has the army. He will force an election and get someone installed as {[prime minister], maybe even Marchpane himself.’

‘Come on!’

Alex let go of her hand and sprinted towards the balloon. Some part of him was troubled by this ungallant abandonment, but the rest of him knew that she was quite capable of covering the distance on her own, and that he needed all of the time that he could provide for himself to make at least an initial study of the operation of the balloon. He reached the basket and stared at the carefully looped lines that draped in great profusion from the iron ring that was suspended above the basket. The basket shook as he felt, rather than saw, Isobel vaulting the wicker wall and tumbling into it.

‘Now what?’

Alex looked up again in despair at the ring. There was only one line whose function was obvious and that was the one that swayed taughtly beside him where it secured the basket to the ground. He heard shouts and looked towards the palace in the fading light. A dozen or more men were running towards them across the immaculately trimmed lawn.

‘Alex!’

He clambered onto the thick sill of wicker, swung the sabre and cut the line. The balloon soared upwards, taking Alex so much by surprise that he fell overboard. He did not fall very far. He looked upwards and saw Isobel holding on to his left arm with both hands. He looked downwards and saw that the ground was already very far away. He dropped the sabre and reached upwards towards her with his other hand. In some desperate last access of strength he hauled himself first up to, and then over the rim of the basket. Isobel grabbed him by the belt and pulled him into the safety of the basket. He lay, face down, smelling the warm plant scent of the wicker and listening to it creak around him as it swayed. From somewhere far beneath them he heard the crackle of musket fire, but it was so faint that he had no doubt that they were already far out of range. He rolled over and looked upwards at the great grey globe of silk that was suspended above them as if by some magical force. Their swift ascent brought them suddenly into the last rays of a sun that they had already seen set. The evnvelope of the balloon was lit up in a blaze of red and gold. He stood up and looked towards Isobel. She was gazing into the distance, towards the sunset and her face glowed with life and beauty in the fiery light. The gentlest of breezes stirred the hair at her brow. Alex had never seen her look more lovely. He staggered to his feet and took her hand. She turned to him and said, ‘You’ve killed us. You bloody fool.’

Death By Water

There had been silence for a long time. The discussion had been brief and very much to the point. The relevant arguments and counter arguments had been tabled, leaving little else to be said. Now, Isobel stood staring out towards the far horizon where the sun had finally set for a second time and Alex hung over opposite edge of the basket trying to gauge their progress.

‘I believe that we have stopped climbing.’ said Alex presently.

Isobel said nothing.

Alex returned to his study of their motion over the far distant ground.

‘The wind is from the south. That is something.’

She turned. ‘And what something is that? That we will drown instead of fall to our deaths?’

Alex found that his patience with her ire had grown suddenly thin, ‘Perhaps we might. At least then you would die content in the knowledge that you had been correct, Madam.’

‘England!’

‘How far is it do you think?’

‘Five miles. Perhaps more.’

‘If we continue to descend at this rate we will fall far short.’

‘Then we must lose more weight.’

‘But there is nothing left to jettison.’

Isobel frowned thinly at him and then, in what Alex found to be a remarkably swift action reached behind her back with both hands, unbuttoned the top half of her bodice and sloughed off her dress. She stepped out of the pile of grey linen, scooped it up and dropped it over the side.

‘It is ten pounds if it is an ounce,’ she said, ‘by my reckoning that should bring us several hundred yards closer to the shore.’

Alex’s mind busied itself with the twin tasks of determining the approximate weight of his own clothing and the somewhat more pressing business of knowing where to look. Isobel’s undergarments were not immodest but, he was forced to concede, they were still undergarments and, repeated inadvertent sidelong glances confirmed, probably French. He turned his back to her and removed both of his shoes and threw them overboard.

‘Two pounds. Perhaps seventy yards.’

There was a series of creaks, accompanied by a great deal of huffing and puffing from Isobel that reminded Alex unaccountably of Admiral Turvey. Something white flew past his left ear and spiralled to the waves below like a wounded seagull.

‘One pound. Thirty yards gained and a good deal more comfortable. Also swimming has now become a possibility for me.’

Alex felt his ears begin to burn.

‘If I knew that it would bring you safely to the shore I would gladly offer myself as ballast,’ he said.

‘Mr Coldstream, if it would bring me safely to the shore, then I would gladly accept, however we both have mathematicks sufficient to realise that unless you are somewhat heavier than a field gun your gesture would be in vain.’

Alex nodded, ‘Then I am sorry that I have led you to this predicament.’

‘I have never been \emph{led anywhere, Mr Coldstream. I am not a goat. Also, I do not believe that you can be unaware that in most quarters it is considered quite rude to hold a conversation with your back to your interlocutor.’

Not for the first time Alex felt himself impaled by the twin tines of a dilemma of manners. He struggled to resolve the conundrum, feeling his own thoughts thrashing like the wheels of the Whirlaway engine when he had asked it to speculate.

‘You need not fear that you would offend my modesty, Mr Coldstream, the imminence of death is sufficient to render that a secondary consideration.’

Alex made a great effort of will and turned to face her. She seemed shorter. He realised that she too had discarded her shoes and stood on the wickerwork of the basket in stockinged feet. The prim starched lines of the governess had disappeared, replaced instead with soft folds of rumpled silk and slackened straps and arms that were brazenly bare from wrist to shoulder. She was smiling at him. Alex did not know if he were more amazed by this, or the fact that his mind continued to function normally, his Whirlaway wheels spinning and ticking quite happily.

‘Perhaps we should compose some last words appropriate for the occasion.’

‘A sort of epitaph?’

‘Yes. I was thinking of something like “She left the world feeling terribly deflated.”

Alex chuckled feeling suddenly at peace with himself and the world and wondering why with all the radiant loveliness of Isobel before him he felt his eyes drawn so unaccountably to her feet.

‘And what would your epitaph be, Mr Coldstream?’

‘There is always the basket itself.’

A moment’s scattered confusion and then the flashing shoal of silver fish snapped back into formation.

‘It is worth at least another mile. Perhaps two. Do you think you could swim to the shore from a mile or more out?’

‘I know that I could not. But I would die the happier knowing that I had tried,’ replied Alex tugging ferociously at the knots on the pair of twisted ropes that bound the basket to the balloon’s iron ring.

Isobel stepped forward and stayed his hand, ‘Or better yet.’she said and clambered up onto the creaking wall of the basket, her stockinged feet arched as she balanced, leaning into the basket, supporting her weight with one hand on the ring and tugging at the knots above those that Alex had loosened.

‘Quickly, there is no time to lose!’

Alex understood at once. He knew that the time for thought had come and gone. He pulled himself onto the wall opposite to her and leaned inwards upon the ring, tugging and worryng at the rope with fingers and teeth.

‘You must secure yourself!’ he called as the first knot came undone.

‘As must you!’ she called back.

The ring dropped downwards suddenly towards Isobel. Alex saw her lose her footing, swaying out precariously over the sea, one hand still on the ring, the other waving in empty space.

His heart stopped.

He watched as she regained her foothold and slipped her arms one at a time through a loop of rope that she had made from the two ends that she had so far freed. He redoubled his efforts and made his own loop, passing it beneath his armpits, and trusting some of his weight to it as he shuffled around the basket.

‘We must undo the last two together or we shall be thrown!’ he called.

She looked up from her work, studied the ring’s rope fastening and then vigorously nodded her assent.

He held her to him with a fierce determination that his own shivering should outdo her own as if in some thermodynamickal trickery he could transfer what heat he had left to her, to win her whatever moments more life he could. Her head rocked back and forth with the violence of her convulsions and he reached behind her and pulled it to his own as they found a common resonance.

‘Captain Wrathbone!’

‘Mr Coldstream. You seem to make a habit of frequenting these waters, though your taste in companions has certainly improved. By God, I’ll say it has.’ Wrathbone’s eye lingered on Isobel longer than Alex felt was altogether necessary to establish this fact.

‘I dare say the admiral would have us establish an aerial blockade against such adventures in the future.’

They made their way silently across the still water, the gentle plashing of the oars muffled by the heavy mist. Alex saw them first.

‘Good god!’ he whispered ‘How many?’

‘Fifty ships of the line. One hundred transports. Forty frigates. Sixty-five thousand men.’

The Hanged Man

‘It is wery obliging of you, Mr Coldstream, wery obliging indeed that you don’t cry out. Mr Footfall has such terrible sensitive ears and men do get to screaming so,’ said Tumbrel.

Alex felt the rope tightening about his throat. His teeth began to chatter.

‘Your Mr Whirlaway now, he was one for the screaming, weren’t he Mr Footfall?’

Footfall grunted as he secured the rope to the cross beam that supported the semaphore arm

and Mr Tumbrel.

‘There are no plans. Plans can be stolen. Plans can be copied. My master built the engine and then he took it to pieces and hid it. He hid instructions on how to assemble the pieces but no design that any man would recognise who did not know what he was looking for.’

A Handful Of Dust

Alex felt it too. A looming presence hanging above them, just beyond the brooding clouds, like a fist ready to strike.

‘This cannot be tolerated, Coldstream, it simply cannot. There can be no freedom in England with this threat hanging over us.’

‘What would you have me do?’

Ever since Mr Lavoisier was a regular correspondent of the original Lunar Men I am afraid.Earlier even than that. Perhaps as long as men of reason have had cause to look in horror at the crimes committed by those who seek to lead us.

But we are not innocent of those crimes. None of us How do you think that you will make a better job of it than Pitt or Liverpool or Collingwood.

‘Because we \emph{are men of reason Alex. Don’t you see? We have fought this war thirty years and for what? Pride and patriotism and pounds of silver. In our world it does not matter that the men who fall on the battlefield are French or English or even bloody Prussian. It matters only that they are men of flesh and blood, men with families and hopes and lives to live that are cut short because a fat minister at table in London feels his pride is put upon. That cannot be the way of it Alex, that cannot be the way the world is managed.’

Alex shook his head, ‘But how? How can you make it work?’

Stephenson laughed, ‘Well don’t you see? That is the beauty of it. We already \emph{are the men who make it work. Not aristocrats, but technocrats. It is we who understand how the machines of iron and steam work, how the machines of state function, the machines of the marketplace. All that remains is for us to disabuse our so-called masters of the notion that they are in charge of anything.

‘And then what?’

‘Then? Then begins a new age of mankind, a glorious era of civilisation and progress - an age of prudence. An age where we can put aside, these bloody, pointless, wasteful, useless wars, put aside the division and waste of nation competing against nation. Imagine what we could do Alex, all of us working together towards the same goals of progress and advancement. Imagine what would happen if we could harness the power of our wonderful machnines to this end instead of turning them into beasts of war. Imagine.

Alex faltered. He found the vision compelling, so wanted to believe in it that he could think of nothing to say, but in his heart he knew that something was wrong with Stephenson’s dream.

You would harness men like machines, or worse, like cogs in a great engine, an engine of your design. Stephenson, the Great Engineer, the one mind who knows the direction in which the human machine should pull. You would make yourself God sir, and no man can do that.

‘It is a great game. A game of chess. Surely a mathematical man such as yourself can appreciate the parallel.’

‘People are dying sir!’

‘Everybody dies, Mr Coldstream, and if the determination of when can be made in such a way as to improve the greater good, then surely that is to be welcomed, is it not?’

‘Would you become a modern Samson, Mr Coldstream? Pulling the great temple of technology down about our ears?’

{[Poynter and Alex in the Blitz]

‘Nothing is more important now. We must …’ he stopped and looked upwards. The screaming wind began to rise again, sliding unstoppably from the edge of hearing into the deafening whoop. Alex thought of falling angels.

What is that sound high in the air

They made as if to run, but there was nowhere to run to.

The shell landed in the next street. A tremendous column of smoke and debris leaped up at once and the rushing air tore at his face and clothes and then knocked him to the street where he lay half prone, gasping for his lost breath and showered with the pulverised remains of whatever had once been in the street beyond.

‘This is the way the world ends,’ murmured Poynter staring up at the ugly black mushroom of smoke and filth.

‘What?’ screamed Alex as soil and cobbles crashed to the ground before them.

‘This is the way the world ends,’ he said, almost snarling as he turned towards Alex, ‘With a bloody great bang, and a tower of smoke. Cities beneath the gun, crushed into the earth. Gone forever.’

‘This is the way the world ends old chum. Not with a bang at all. Don’t you see?’

Poynter smiled a strange smile that slipped slowly from him and Alex knew that the poet was dead.

{[he wins but he loses his mind, what is Alex’s Samson moment?]

He could not speak. He was neither living nor dead, and he knew nothing. He felt

and all the mad world dashing past him headlong and eager for its future.

Whirlaway, whirlaway.

Alex sat down by the water and wept as he looked out at Telford’s bridge where it sagged into the Thames.

London Bridge is falling down, falling down

London Bridge is falling down

My fair lady.